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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

What Is and What Might be. 
In Defence of What Might Be. 
The Tragedy of Education. 
The Nemesis of Docility. 
The Problem of the Soul. 

E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 
NEW YORK 



THE SECRET OF 
THE CROSS 

A PLEA FOR A RE-PRESENTATION 
OF CHRISTIANITY 

BY 

EDMOND HOLMES 

AUTHOR OF 
"WHAT IS AND WHAT MIGHT BE," ETC. 



"Man is religious only in the degree in which 
ultimate ideals are real to him. 1 ' 

Sir Charles Walston. 




NEW YORK 

E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 

681 Fifth Avenue 



v\ 



1?\<> K 



Copyright 1919 

By E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 



All Rights Reserved 



MAY 10 1919 

Printed in the United States of America 

©CIA515480 





CONTENTS 




CHAPTER 


PAGE 


I 


The Failure op Christianity . . 


1 


II 


The Fallacy of the Miraculous 


14 


III 


The Fallacy op the Supernatural 


23 


IV 


The Genesis op the Supernatural . 


39 


V 


The Disruption of the Universe 


48 


VI 


The God Who Takes Sides 


. 58 


VII 


The Unity of the Universe . 


. 73 


VIII 


God The Father 


. 79 


IX 


The Supreme Choice .... 


. 89 


X 


The Arch-Enemy 


, 98 


XI 


The Meaning of Self-Sacrifice 


. 103 


XII 


Guidance From Within . . . 


. 110 


XIII 


The Antidote to Separatism 


. 120 


XIV 


The Soul of Christ's Teaching . 


. 127 


XV 


Dead Wood 


. 132 


XVI 


These Little Ones .... 


143 


XVII 


Social Reform 


. 152 


XVIII 


Christ and God 


. 165 


XIX 


The Mystery of Evil . . . 


. 168 



THE SECRET OF THE GROSS 



THE FAILURE OF CHRISTIANITY 

IT is often said at the present day that Chris- 
tendom is relapsing into paganism. Those 
who say this are as a rule devout Christians of 
an orthodox type. Complaints of the growing 
infidelity of the age come from thousands of 
pulpits, Catholic, Anglican, Calvinistic. At the 
yearly meetings of the Catholic Truth Society 
the irreligiousness of the modern world has 
been deplored. Dr. J. N. Figgis, a learned 
Anglican of the High Church School, has re- 
cently told us that the Western World is no 
more Christian to-day than it was in the early 
days of the Roman Empire. Protestantism 
is undoubtedly less Puritanical — less rigid, 



2 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

austere, and exclusive — than it used to be ; and 
where Puritanism survives, its votaries point 
to its fall in favor as proof of the gradual 
decay of religious faith. 

Are we to admire these witnesses for their 
candor in admitting that Christianity, the re- 
ligion which they profess, has proved a failure? 
Or are we to suspect them of suggesting that 
it would not have proved a failure if only their 
own special brand of Christianity had been 
accepted as the true brand? I cannot say. But 
I feel that their concurrent testimony, however 
they may interpret it, deserves to be carefully 
weighed, if only for the reason that, as cham- 
pions of Christian orthodoxy, they have every- 
thing to lose from the implicit admission of 
the /failure of their cherished creed. 

Is Christendom becoming non-Christian? 
Professor Eucken, the idealistic philosopher, 
goes so far as to say that it is becoming anti- 
Christian. " There is probably," he tells us, 
"more antipathy against religion to-day and a 
more widespread denial of it than has ever 
been the case before." Is this charge justified? 
Or, if it goes too far, by how much does it 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 3 

overshoot the mark? Christianity set out to 
evangelize the world. Has it failed in its self- 
imposed mission, and has the paganizing of 
Christendom which is said to be in progress 
set the seal on its failure? Let us try to look 
the facts in the face. When Christianity was 
at the zenith of its triumphant progress, it had 
evangelized perhaps one-fourth of the human 
race. That fraction is what we call Christen- 
dom. Is it true that the ideas and ideals of 
Christianity are ceasing to appeal to it? We 
must, I think, admit that the externals of Chris- 
tianity — its creeds, its catechisms, its cere- 
-monial observances — count for less to-day in 
the lives of men than in any previous age. 
There are millions of men among our contem- 
poraries who would have been called God-fear- 
ing a generation ago — men who are law-abid- 
ing, honest and upright, clean livers, faithful 
husbands, good fathers, kind neighbors, and so 
forth — but who do not give a thought to the 
religion which they are supposed to profess. 
Indeed the non-professing Christian, whether 
agnostic or merely indifferent, is often a better 
citizen and a more virtuous man than the ortho- 



4 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

dox believer who subscribes to all the doctrines 
and discharges all the ceremonial observances 
of his creed. We must also admit that the es- 
sentials of Christianity — if we may define these 
provisionally as purity, charity, unselfishness, 
and self-sacrifice — count for less to-day, than 
they did in the only epoch in which they counted 
for much — the days of the early Christians. But 
the same may be said of every generation since 
the passing of the third. Consciously this is 
perhaps the least religious of all the genera- 
tions. But its indifference to the externals of 
Christianity is quite compatible with a genuine, 
if largely subconscious, interest in some, at 
least, of its essentials. 

In what sense, then, can it be said that Chris- 
tendom to-day is relapsing into paganism? In- 
difference to the externals of Christianity does 
not constitute paganism so long as the essential 
spirit of it still is a living influence. But what 
is the essential spirit of Christianity? And is 
it still a living influence? And if so, in what 
degree? A book which has recently appeared, 
and which is deservedly popular, throws light 
on both these problems. The writer, who 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 5 

called himself 1 "A Student-in-Arms," and who 
served in the New Army as a private, a non- 
commissioned officer, and a commissioned 
officer, having an observant mind and a sympa- 
thetic heart, got into close touch in the course 
of his varied experiences with all sorts and 
conditions of men. Himself profoundly reli- 
gious, but freer than most men from religious 
prepossessions, he took a deep interest in the 
attitude towards religion of his comrades in 
the army, and especially of the rank and file. 
What the "ranker," the plain average com- 
mon soldier, feels about religion our author has 
set forth in the following passage: "We were 
to go into the trenches for the first time the 
next day. I think that every one was feeling a 
little awed. Unfortunately we had just been 
to an open-air service, where the chaplain had 
made desperate efforts to frighten us. The re- 
sult was just what might have been expected. 
We were rather indignant. We might be a 
little bit frightened inside; but we were not 
going to admit it. Above all, we were not going 
to turn religious at the last minute because we 

1 He was killed in battle in France. 



6 THE SECRET OP THE CROSS 

were afraid. So one man began to scoff at the 
Old Testament, David and Bathsheba, Jonah 
and the whale, and so forth. Another capped 
him by laughing at the feeding of the 5000. 
A third said that in his opinion any one who 
pretended to be a Christian in the army was a 
humbug. ... It was not much but enough to 
convince me that the soldier — in this case the 
soldier means the workingman — does not in the 
least connect the things that he really believes 
in with Christianity. He thinks that Chris- 
tianity consists in believing the Bible and set- 
ting up to be better than your neighbors. By 
believing the Bible he means believing that 
Jonah was swallowed by the whale. By setting 
up to be better than your neighbors he means 
not drinking, not swearing, and preferably not 
smoking, being close-fisted with your money, 
avoiding the companionship of doubtful com- 
panions and refusing to acknowledge that such 
have any claim upon you. 

"This is surely nothing short of tragedy. 
Here were men who believed absolutely in the 
Christian virtues of unselfishness, generosity, 
charity and humility, without ever connecting 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 7 

them in their minds with Christ; and at the 
same time what they did associate with Chris- 
tianity was just on a par with the formalism 
and smug self -righteousness which Christ spent 
his whole life in trying to destroy, 

"The chaplains as a rule failed to realize 
this. They saw the inarticulateness and as- 
sumed a lack of any religion. They remon- 
strated with their hearers for not saying their 
prayers and not coming to communion, and not 
being afraid to die without making their peace 
with God. They did not grasp that the men 
really had deep-seated beliefs in goodness and 
that the only reason why they did not pray and 
go to communion was that they never connected 
the goodness in which they believed with the 
God in whom the chaplains said they ought to 
believe. If they had connected Christianity 
with unselfishness and the rest they would have 
been prepared to look at Christ as their Master 
and their Saviour." 

In this passage two facts are insisted upon, 
both of which are of supreme importance. The 
first is that the common soldier — in other 
words, the average "working-man" — has it in 



8 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

him to "believe absolutely in the Christian 
virtues of unselfishness, generosity, charity and 
humility.' ' The second is that in spite of this 
he holds aloof from Christianity because he 
thinks that Christianity consists in believing in 
the Bible (by which he means believing in the 
miracles recorded in the Bible) and in setting 
up to be better than your neighbors. This re- 
jection of religion by men who at heart are 
truly and deeply religious is indeed a tragedy. 
Who is to blame for it? For fifteen centuries 
the Churches of Christendom have had things 
all their own way. They have given definite 
dogmatic instruction in what they hold to be 
the essential truths of Christianity to all bap- 
tized Christians, beginning with children of the 
age of three. And this is the result. There is 
surely something wrong with the instruction 
which has alienated from Christianity the rank 
and file of Christendom. Or are we to blame 
the soldiers whom the Student-in-Arms has 
introduced to us, for having misinterpreted the 
message which had been delivered to them? 
I do not think so. They have undoubtedly 
seized on what was less essential in that mes- 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 9 

sage and regarded it as quintessential. But 
that was inevitable. Whenever a debased cur- 
rency is placed on a par with a sterling coin- 
age — I cannot say this too often — the former 
will sooner or later drive the latter out of cir- 
culation. The soldiers who scoffed at religion 
were taught that the Bible is the Word of God, 
and were strictly forbidden to criticise it. This 
meant that they were to accept even the least 
credible of its stories as " gospel truth"; in 
other words, that they were to identify reli- 
gious faith with credulity. They were taught, 
too, that religion was a matter of creeds and 
catechisms, of forms and ceremonies, for which 
one day in seven was set apart and (in the 
case of the schools which they attended) one- 
half hour in each morning session. They were 
thus encouraged, if not actually required to 
identify religiousness with aloofness from the 
workaday world. And other influences, which 
I need not for the moment consider, directed 
them to the same conclusion. 

Let us first consider their attitude towards 
the miraculous. It is not from perversity that 
the man in the ranks (or the man in the street) 



10 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

identifies Christianity with belief in the story 
of Jonah and the whale. A chain is no stronger 
than its weakest link ; and if acceptande^f^the 
miraculous is to be exacted from every one 
who is to be passed as orthodox, the least 
credible of Bible miracles becomes the key posi- 
tion of the whole scheme of doctrinal defence. 
Nor is it only the sceptic who, in testing the 
chain, feels instinctively for its weakest link. 
The champions of orthodoxy are apt to lay 
special stress on what is least sound and least 
vital in their teaching, for the plain reason that 
it is most open to attack. It was not for re- 
jecting the spiritual essentials of Christianity 
— its transformation of our ideals, its demand 
for self-sacrifice, its glorification of love — that 
the Inquisitors sent heretics to the dungeon 
and the stake. It was for disputing proposi- 
tions which did not necessarily make for edifi- 
cation, and which, as the heretics protested, 
outraged reason and common sense. 

It will perhaps be contended that the story 
of Jonah and the whale is no longer taken seri- 
ously even by those who call themselves Chris- 
tians. This may be true ; but the general idea 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 11 

that the power to work miracles proved that 
the worker had received a divine commission, 
is still taken seriously by nearly all the apolo- 
gists for Christianity; and so long as this is 
so it matters little whether this or that story 
of the miraculous is to be defended or thrown 
to the wolves. When Dr. Hensley Henson was 
nominated to the Bishopric of Hereford, the 
Bishop of Oxford, who, as the editor of Lux 
Mundi, had been censured by the late Canon 
Liddon for undervaluing the supernatural ele- 
ment in Christianity, in a letter of protest 
against the appointment wrote as follows: "I 
am amazed at the naive confidence with which 
he [Dr. Henson] assumes that the theological 
ideas of the Church and the New Testament 
. . . can survive unimpaired when the miracu- 
lous facts have been repudiated. . . . The 
Catholic Church from the beginning . . . has 
insisted on holding together the [theological] 
ideas and the miraculous facts." Coming as it 
does from a prominent Churchman who has 
himself been denounced as unorthodox on ac- 
count of his critical attitude towards the 
Canonical Scriptures, this pronouncement is 



12 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

significant, to say the least. It is evident that 
belief in the miraculous is still regarded by 
those in authority as a vital element in the 
Christian's faith. That being so, the skeptical 
soldiers who identified Christianity with belief 
in incredible stores of "miraculous facts " had 
some justification for their apparent confusion 
of thought. If you place acceptance of Christ's 
miracles by the side of acceptance of his mes- 
sage, as a proof of Christian orthodoxy, you 
must not be surprised if, in a critical age, men 
pick out the most impossible of the Gospel 
miracles (seasoning these at discretion with 
the most impossible of the Old Testament 
miracles) and say to you: "We do not believe 
that such things ever happened. Therefore on 
your showing we are not Christians. ' y 

"The Catholic Church from the beginning 
has insisted on holding together the ideas and 
the miraculous facts." No doubt it has. But 
has it been wise to do so? And will it do so to 
the end? It is the Catholic Church which com- 
plains most bitterly that Christendom is relaps- 
ing into paganism. Can it be that the aliena- 
tion of the modern world from Christianity is 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 13 

due, in part at least, to the Catholic Church 
having based its presentation of Christianity 
on acceptance of certain alleged "miraculous 
facts," the result of this being that, when 
miracles began to be discredited, the "theologi- 
cal ideas' ' of the Church began to fall into dis- 
repute ? 

The Bishop of Oxford seems to have con- 
vinced himself that were the miraculous facts 
of the Bible to be repudiated, the theological 
ideas on which Christendom has been fed for 
so many centuries would not survive unim- 
paired. If he speaks with authority, the out- 
look for Christian theology is dark indeed, for 
belief in the miraculous is undoubtedly going 
by the board. 

Let us study the problem of the miraculous 
and ask ourselves whether, if men ceased to be- 
lieve in miracles, they would be bound — by any 
logical or psychological compulsion — to reject 
Christianity and close their hearts against the 
message of Christ. 



II 

THE FALLACY OF THE MIRACULOUS 

WHAT is a miracle? "The New English 
Dictionary/ ' to which one naturally 
turns in one's perplexity, defines a miracle as 
"a marvelous event occurring within human 
experience which cannot be brought about by 
human power or by the operation of any na- 
tural agency, and must therefore be ascribed 
to the special intervention of the Deity or of 
some supernatural being; especially an act ex- 
hibiting control over the laws of nature and 
serving as evidence that the agent is either 
Divine or is specially favored by God." If this 
is what a miracle means, it may safely be said 
that miracles do not happen, or that if they 
do happen they are not miracles. This sounds 
like a wanton paradox ; but I can, I think, make 
its meaning clear. It could not have been said 
a century ago, or even a generation ago, but it 

14 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 15 

can be said now. For men are at last begin- 
ning to turn away from miracles, not so much 
in the direction of denying them point-blank — 
they did this to their heart's content in the 
past century, and it led them nowhere — as of 
explaining them and so proving that even if 
they are well authenticated they are not mirac- 
ulous. If one of the miracles recorded in the 
Bible were reported to have happened to-day, 
and if after due inquiry we had satisfied our- 
selves that it had happened, we should at once 
assume that though it seemed to defy scientific 
explanation it really admitted of it. We should 
investigate it on the assumption that there was 
a place for it, as for every other phenomenon, 
in the order of nature, and that laws and forces 
which, though obscure and possibly occult, 
were not the less natural, had co-operated to 
produce it. Looking at things from this point 
of view I am disposed to say that a majority of 
the miracles recorded in the Bible may well 
have happened, but that if they did happen 
they tell us nothing except that the resources 
of nature are illimitable and that many of its 
mysteries are still unprobed. 



16 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

I say this the more readily because, as it 
happens, two-thirds of the Bible miracles are 
concerned either with healing or with clairvoy- 
ance, and because miracles of both these types 
have been recorded in all ages and are to-day 
familiar to all who are interested in "faith- 
healing" and in "psychical research." No 
one can read the annals of Lourdes 1 or of the 
Christian Science movement without feelingf 
certain that even in this materialistic age mir- 
acles of healing are by no means rare. And 
because they are by no means rare, those who 

*Dr. A. T. Schofield, in his book The Borderland of 
Science, tells the following story of a Lourdes cure: "A 
workman, Louis Bournett, had lost the sight of his right eye 
for twenty years; Dr. Douglas considered the case incurable. 
One day the man rubbed his blind eye with some muddy 
Lourdes water; he uttered a loud cry and his sight was soon 
restored. He met the doctor and told him he was cured. ' Im- 
possible ! f said the doctor, ' you are incurable ; my treatment 
cannot restore your sight. ' 'It is not you who cured me/ said 
the man, 'it is the Virgin. ' The doctor shrugged his shoulders, 
drew a notebook out of his pocket and wrote a few words in 
pencil. With one hand he closed the man's sound eye, and 
with the other held the penciled scrap before the blind one. 
' If you can read that I will believe you. ' Bournett read aloud : 
'Bournett has an incurable amaurosis, and it will never be 
better.' On this evidence Dr. Douglas and Dr. Verges of 
Tarbes deposed that this was a dona fide 'miracle.' " Many 
of the Christian Science " miracles' ' are as remarkable as this 
and as well authenticated. 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 17 

take a scientific interest in them instinctively 
assume that they are not miracles, that on the 
contrary they are the necessary products of 
natural causes, the necessary resultants of 
natural forces, and that it is only ignorance 
of the deeper mysteries of nature which hinders 
us in each case from ascertaining the causes 
and evaluating the forces. This, I say, men 
instinctively take for granted nowadays. The 
theories that they devise to account for the 
"miraculous facts' ' need not detain us. It is 
the mental attitude of the theorists, their im- 
plicit rejection of the supernatural when they 
deal with mysteries which fall within their own 
experience, that is of interest from our present 
point of view. 

It is the same with the miracles of clairvoy- 
ance. The Biblical name for clairvoyance is 
prophecy. The "prophet'' is one who is able 
to see through a wall of separation. Whether 
what lies beyond that wall belongs to the past, 
the present, or the future matters nothing. 
There are many prophecies in the Bible besides 
those which deal with the future. Elisha, for 
example, proved himself a prophet when "his 



18 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

heart went with" Gehazi during the latter *s 
nefarious dealings with Naaman. When Christ, 
in his discourse with the woman of Samaria, 
read the archives of her soul and told her some 
salient facts of her past life, "the woman saith 
unto him, Sir, I perceive thou art a prophet." 
So, too, when Christ had been blindfolded, the 
soldiers who struck him on the face "asked 
him saying, Prophesy who is it that smote 
thee ? 9 ' These examples, which might be multi- 
plied indefinitely, show that what the trans- 
lators of the Bible call "prophecy" we should 
call "clairvoyance" (or, in some cases, "clair- 
audience"). 1 Now miracles of clairvoyance, 
far from being confined to Bible times, have 
been recorded in all ages and are as common 
to-day as they have ever been. Stories of sec- 
ond sight, of thought-reading, of telepathy, of 
"hypnagogic vision," meet one at every turn. 
Some of these stories will not bear investiga- 
tion. Others will. When all doubtful stories 

1 " Prophetic ' ' clairvoyance is not necessarily " psychic.' ' 
Sometimes the power of reading the unknown is the outcome of 
vision into the heart of the known. Clairvoyance of this type 
may be less mysterious than the other, but it is not a whit more 
natural. 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 19 

have been rejected, there will always remain a 
solid residuum of genuine "miraculous fact." 
But here again, when once we have satisfied 
ourselves that the alleged miracles did actually 
happen, we cease to regard them as miraculous. 
Are we, then, to say that miracles of healing 
and clairvoyance are supernatural when we 
read of them in the Bible, but that when we 
hear of them as happening to-day or yester- 
day they are natural phenomena? Or are we 
to say (if we happen to be devout Catholics) 
that miracles, when they take place at Lourdes 
or at some other shrine, are supernatural, but 
that Christian Science miracles or "secular" 
miracles, of practically the same character, are 
natural? Such distinctions are illogical, not 
to say irrational; and though, owing to our 
tendency to invest religion with an atmosphere 
of unreality and disconnect it from our normal 
experience, we may cling to them for a time, 
they are bound sooner or later to efface them- 
selves. The struggle between superstition and 
science can have but one issue, however long 
that issue may be delayed. And it is possible 
that while we are waiting for that issue, science, 



20 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

in and through its very effort to destroy super- 
stition by accounting for the facts on which it 
feeds, will transform itself beyond recognition 
and bring new worlds within its scope. 

The modern attitude towards the miraculous 
is aptly illustrated in a book which has recently 
appeared, called The Reality of Psychic Phe- 
nomena, The author, Mr. Crawford, a lecturer 
on mechanical engineering at Belfast, being in- 
timately acquainted with a non-professional 
medium of exceptional power, was able to con- 
duct a series of psychical experiments which he 
has duly recorded, with all the caution and ex- 
actness of the trained scientist, in his book. 
Among the phenomena investigated were those 
of levitation. Having satisfied himself in each 
case that trickery was impossible and that the 
levitation of the table (for example) was an 
actuality, he was able to prove, by the use of 
elaborate and accurate weighing-machines, that 
the weight of the medium was increased by 
almost exactly the weight of the levitated 
object. 1 This showed that though there was 

*In the case of a table weighing 10 lbs. 97 per cent was 
added to the weight of the medium. The small fraction re- 
maining was distributed among the other persons who took 
part in the seance. 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 21 

no physical contact whatever between the 
medium and the object, she was somehow or 
other supporting the latter in the air. And 
this led on to the further inference that there 
was an emanation of imperceptible and super- 
physical matter from her body, which, acting 
like a cantilever, had lifted the object from the 
floor and suspended it at a certain height above 
it. With our author's investigations and 
theories we need not further concern ourselves. 
What is significant in his book, from my pres- 
ent point of view, is his attitude towards the 
miraculous. In pre-scientific times the levita- 
tion of a table would have been regarded as a 
miracle. Stories of levitation are sometimes 
met with in the lives of the saints ; and the mir- 
acle is always regarded as a proof of super- 
natural grace and favor. But Mr. Crawford 
instinctively assumed that the phenomena of 
levitation which he witnessed, if genuine, must 
have been the effects of natural though mysteri- 
ous causes and must have exemplified the work- 
ing of natural though unknown laws. He as- 
sumed, in other words, that, though certainly 
supernormal (and possibly superphysical), 
they were not supernatural; that, on the con- 



22 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

trary, a scientific explanation of them, an ex- 
planation which would assign them their place 
in order of nature, was forthcoming if it could 
only be discovered. 

The truth is that the modern attitude to- 
wards the miraculous is symptomatic of a 
growing change in our attitude towards nature 
and the supernatural. With the progress of 
scientific research, the horizon which bounds 
our vision of nature recedes indefinitely; but 
so long as we believe in the supernatural we 
impose limits on nature, however remote those 
limits may be. But the assumption that even 
miraculous occurrences are explicable in terms 
of natural laws and forces resolves itself into 
the secret conviction that nature is absolutely 
infinite — infinite in every sense of the word, in- 
finite in every dimension and on every plane of 
its being — and that therefore there is no place 
in the Universe for the supernatural. 

From the lesser problem let us now pass on 
to the larger. 



Ill 

THE FALLACY OF THE SUPERNATURAL 

MIRACLES are the credentials which the 
ambassadors of the supernatural God 
are expected to produce in order to prove that 
they are what they profess to be. "Without 
miracles a "revealed religion " cannot make 
good its claim to a supernatural origin. So 
theologians argue. But this, as we have just 
seen, is the conception of the miraculous from 
which men are beginning to turn away. For- 
merly, when a " free-thinker' ' heard of a mirac- 
ulum, a wonderful happening which he could 
not see his way to account for, he rejected the 
story offhand, thereby showing that he was no 
free-thinker, but the slave of his own mental 
limitations and prejudices. Now he investi- 
gates the story, on the implicit assumption that 
if the miraculum did happen it was not super- 
natural. 

23 



24 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

The idea of the supernatural, then, is the 
point on which the controversy between criti- 
cism — free-thought — and Christian ' ' ortho- 
doxy' ' turns. The word "supernatural" is the 
differential factor in the orthodox definition of 
a miracle, the definition which free-thought is 
now tacitly rejecting. What does the word 
mean ? The ' i New English Dictionary ' ' defines 
it as "that is above nature, belonging to a 
higher realm or system than that of nature; 
transcending the powers and the ordinary 
course of nature.' ' Here the introduction of 
the word ordinary stultifies the rest of the 
definition; so for the moment I will ignore it. 
The two words "above nature" are really suffi- 
cient for our purpose. They enable us to real- 
ize on what an unsound basis the idea of the 
supernatural reposes. Theologians use their 
favorite word with confidence and precision as 
if it were a term in exact science. But when 
we ask them what it means they refer us, in 
their definition of it, to the largest, the vaguest, 
the most protean of all conceptions. They 
define it as "that is above nature." What, 
then, do they mean by "nature"? Or rather—? 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 25 

for they have no exclusive rights in it — what 
does the world at large mean by the word? 
Who can say? No word, as far as I know, is 
used so freely, so loosely, so illogically, so an- 
archically. Yet, until we have come to some 
sort of an understanding with ourselves as to 
the range and meaning of " nature,' ' we are 
but beating the air when we talk about the 
supernatural. 

Let us, then, again consult our oracle. We 
shall find that it gives many columns to this 
elusive word. It begins by defining " nature' ' 
as "the essential qualities or properties of a 
thing, the inherent and inseparable combina- 
tion of properties essentially pertaining to any- 
thing and giving it its fundamental character.' ' 
This may be regarded as the germinal mean- 
ing of the word, the seed out of which all its 
meanings and sub-meanings have grown. 
There is nothing on earth or in heaven — noth- 
ing great or small, high or low, multiple or 
single, collective or individual, known or un- 
known, actual or possible — to which a nature, 
in this sense of the word, is not attributable. 
We speak of the nature of an insect, of the 



26 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

nature of a rock, of the nature of man, of the 
nature of a wave, of the nature of the solar sys- 
tem, of the nature of the Universe itself. Even 
the supernatural world, if there is such a 
thing, must needs have a nature of its own. 
And in the first of the Thirty-nine Arti- 
cles of the Anglican Church, the divines 
who drafted it have taken great pains to 
set forth the nature of the supernatural 
God. 

From this meaning we pass on almost im- 
perceptibly to another. As the nature of a 
thing determines the fundamental character of 
the thing, and as we sometimes speak of a 
man as "a character' ' (good or bad), so there 
is a tendency to use the word " nature' ' in the 
sense (to quote the " Dictionary" again) of 
"an individual character or disposition con- 
sidered as an entity in itself." This use of 
the word is rare when individual things are 
dealt with. But when we are thinking of things 
in their totality, it is very common. Under 
one of the headings in the "Dictionary" the 
word is defined as "the creative and regulative 
physical power which is conceived as operating 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 27 

in the material world and as the immediate 
cause of all phenomena (personified as a 
female being)." This is Nature with a capital 
N. Under the next heading but one the word 
is defined as "the material world, or its collec- 
tive objects and phenomena, especially the fea- 
tures and products of the earth itself, as con- 
trasted with those of human civilization." 
Here the transition from abstract to concrete 
(so to speak) is complete. But why are we to 
limit the idea of nature to the material world? 
In the root-sense of the word — "the essential 
qualities and properties of a thing" — the idea 
of nature is, as we have seen, universally ap- 
plicable ; and it is therefore applicable, whether 
as a quasi-abstract or as a quasi-concrete term, 
to the totality of things, to the Universe itself. 
If "the creative and regulative physical power 
which is conceived of as operating in the ma- 
terial world" may fitly be spoken of as "na- 
ture, ' ' why should not the same term be applied 
to the creative and regulative power (whether 
physical or spiritual or both) which is con- 
ceived of, or may be conceived of, as operating 
in the whole wide world? There is no reason 



28 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

why it should not be; or rather, if we allow 
our use of the word; " nature' 9 to be guided by- 
its germinal meaning, there is every reason 
why it should be. But if it may be so applied, 
if the creative and regulative power which is 
conceived of as operative in the Universe may 
be spoken of as " nature,' ' then the limitation 
of the quasi-concrete usage of the word to the 
"material world" is as illogical as the cor- 
responding limitation of the quasi-abstract 
usage, and we are therefore free to identify 
nature, whether we regard it as a power or 
as an entity, with the totality of things. A 
few writers have felt the force of this unformu- 
lated argument, and have used the word to in- 
clude the spiritual as well as the material 
world; but as only two passages from their 
works are quoted in the "New English Dic- 
tionary," I gather that they are a very small 
minority. 

Yet they have logic — the inner logic of things 
— on their side. The tendency to draw an 
arbitrary line of demarcation above or beyond 
nature, and then to oppose nature (so de- 
limited) to something higher and wider than 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 29 

itself — to the supernatural, the spiritual, the 
divine, the human, to civilization, to art, to 
grace, and so forth — invariably leads to con- 
fusion of speech and thought. 

Let us consider one or two typical passages 
in which this tendency is exemplified. 

We have seen that the "New English Dic- 
tionary' ' defines the supernatural as "that 
which transcends the power or the ordinary 
course of nature." In introducing the word 
"ordinary" into this definition it has no doubt 
correctly interpreted popular usage. But if 
so, what confusion of thought it bears witness 
to! For either the word "ordinary" has no 
meaning, or it means that there is such a thing 
as an extraordinary course of nature — in other 
words, that there is an order of things which is 
at once extraordinary (or supernormal) and 
natural. But if there is such an order, if na- 
ture can transcend itself, why should its self- 
transcendence be spoken of as swpzr -natural? 

In one of the sub-definitions given in the 
"Dictionary" "nature" is identified with "the 
features and products of earth as contrasted 
with those of human civilization." Here the 



30 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

transforming influence of man on his own out- 
ward life and surroundings seems to be re- 
garded as anti-natural or non-natural. But do 
not the faculties and capacities which have en- 
abled man to work such transformation belong 
to human nature? And if so, is not the opposi- 
tion of nature to civilization fundamentally- 
fallacious? So, too, in the case of man's inner 
life, we apply the term "natural" to what is 
undeveloped and untransf ormed ; we sum up 
man's undisciplined desires and unregulated 
impulses under the general head of "human 
nature" and oppose them to the transforming 
power which he brings to bear on them. But 
does not the transforming power belong to 
man's nature? If it does not, from what source 
does it come? The orthodox Christian will 
probably tell us that its source is a super- 
natural influence which he calls "grace." But 
if that were its only source, how would non- 
religious men be able to discipline and other- 
wise regulate their desires and impulses? They 
must surely draw their power from a source 
which is in themselves, and which therefore 
belongs to human nature. 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 31 

"This is an art 
Which does mend nature, change it rather, but 
The art itself is nature." 

In an address which he recently gave in this 
country, Professor George Santayana, the 
American philosopher, speaking of certain ten- 
dencies of contemporary thought, said that 
"psychological criticism carried to these 
lengths (i.e., to "the elimination of conscious- 
ness and truth as ordinarily conceived") left 
subjectivism behind and restored the natural 
world to its rights, even if in an inadequate 
form and at the expense of mind." Here the 
"natural world" seems to mean no more than 
the objective material world. But is that world 
the whole of nature? Does one restore the 
"natural world to its rights" by the severe 
limitation of it which is involved in the elimina- 
tion of consciousness and mind? Do not they, 
too, belong to nature ? Is not the dawn of con- 
sciousness, which is perhaps the central fea- 
ture of the drama of man's life, a natural pro- 
cess? If it is not, how has it come about? What 
is dawning and out of what source has it arisen? 

In an article by Mr. Clutton Brock which 



32 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

appeared in the "Educational Supplement to 
the Times" I find the following sentence: "The 
Grace of God is nothing else than the power 
of transcending the struggle for life in thought 
and in action, the power of seeing through the 
natural order to a reality in which that 
struggle is transcended. ' \ A distinguished 
physicist having asked what this sentence 
means "in plain English/ ' our author tries to 
explain it ; and in the course of his explanation 
he tells us that according to the doctrine of the 
Grace of God "there is a natural order in 
which men may live merely so that they may 
go on living; and to those who do so the order 
will seem to be the only reality. But those who 
refuse to live for the sake of living will be- 
come more and more aware of another order, 
which we may call supernatural, if we mean 
thereby that it is more, not less, real than the 
natural order.' ' Here our author's argument 
is stultified by his implicit assumption that "a 
natural order' ' and "the natural order" are 
the same thing. In point of fact there is all the 
difference in the world between them. What 
is the natural order? That is what we all 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 33 

want to find out. To say that it is the same 
as "a [certain] natural order" in which 
beetles and butterflies live as well as human 
beings, and to assume that it does not tran- 
scend that low level, is to close the controversy 
between naturalism and supernaturalism by 
the familiar device of "begging the question/ ' 
The "other order' ' of which Mr. Clutton Brock 
speaks may well transcend the particular "na- 
tural order' ' in which the mere continuance of 
life is regarded as an end in itself, and yet not 
be other than natural. Is not sympathy a 
tendency of human nature? Is not love? Is 
not the capacity for self-sacrifice ? Do we mean 
by human nature nothing more than its own 
animal basis? Why, the very animals will 
sometimes sacrifice their lives in defence of 
their young or (as in the case of ants and 
bees) in devotion to a common cause. Are we 
to suppose that in thus "refusing to live for 
the sake of living" they, too, are inspired by 
the "grace of God?" Until we have de- 
termined what is "the natural order," we are 
not in a position to ask whether it is or is not 
transcended by some higher order. Meanwhile 



34 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

we can at least remind ourselves that "the 
natural order' ' is not necessarily the same 
thing as "a natural order' ' which it serves our 
purpose to disparage. 

These are examples of what I take leave to 
regard as loose and slovenly usage of the word 
" nature." In each case the writer seems to be 
subconsciously influenced by a particular tend- 
ency of thought — the tendency to confuse na- 
ture as such with the lower and more material 
side of nature. In Mr. A. J. Balfour's book, 
The Fdundations of Belief, this tendency rises 
into consciousness. A whole section of the 
book is devoted to a searching criticism of a 
philosophy which our author labels "natural- 
ism," but which coincides at every vital point 
with what is usually known as "materialism." 
This confusion of naturalism with materialism, 
like the confusion of idealism with "solipsism," 
by which it is followed, has an obvious purpose. 
Mr. Balfour is trying to clear the ground for 
a vindication of supernatural religion; and as 
naturalistic idealism is the most formidable 
rival of supernaturalism, he seeks to discredit 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 35 

the former by caricaturing each of its compo- 
nent strains of thought. 

In Professor Eucken's philosophical works 
the popular underestimate of nature is deliber- 
ately endorsed in the supposed interest, not of 
supernaturalism, but of spiritual idealism. The 
result is, as might be expected, extraordinary 
confusion of thought and language. The idea 
which dominates Professor Eucken's philos- 
ophy is that the spiritual life is the real life 
of man; that u as a whole in all its infinity" 
. . . "it has existed within his being as a pos- 
sibility from the very commencement"; and 
that "in laying hold of spiritual life he dis- 
covers his own true self." This spiritual life 
is man's "specific nature," his "true being," 
his "genuine self." It is "rooted in the essen- 
tial nature of things." It is "the coming to 
itself of the world-process." It is "a cosmic 
force operative in man from the very outset." 
Reading these and similar passages (of which 
there are scores) one naturally concludes that 
the spiritual life is at the heart of nature, both 
cosmic and human. But no. The spiritual life 
is "a new state of reality against that of na- 



36 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

ture." It is "a new stage of life" and not 
"a mere prolongation of nature." "The life 
which develops in man" is "not a continuation 
of nature." "The development of spiritual 
life" has "raised man far above nature." 
Nature is opposed to the "soul," opposed to 
the "spiritual life," opposed to the "spiritual 
world," opposed to "man's life of his own." 

What does Professor Eucken mean by "na- 
ture." He tells us that "the natural world is 
blindly indifferent ... to the aims of spiritual 
life," that "nature threatens to oppress and 
overwhelm humanity"; that "naturalism" 
ignores "the rights of the subject" and the 
"life of the spirit." He identifies nature with 
"the pettily human," and "the world of na- 
ture" with "the sphere of visible existence." 
Yet he does not always use "nature" in a de- 
preciatory sense. The intrinsic force of the 
word is too strong for him. He speaks of 
"man's spiritual nature" and opposes it to 
"mere humanity' ' (whatever that may mean). 
He says that "nature and the inner world meet 
within a single reality"; that "the spiritual 
life has a nature of its own"; that it has "its 



THE SECRET OP THE CROSS 37 

own inner nature"; that it is "at once natural 
and ideal ' ' ; that i i spiritual culture ' ' is " rooted 
in the essential nature of things"; that 
spiritual work "separates what is genuine in 
nature from what is not"; and so on. 

How is it that a responsible thinker has been 
content to involve himself in such a maze of 
inconsistencies and contradictions? The ex- 
planation is comparatively simple. Professor 
Eucken's main thesis is that the spiritual life 
is the real life of man and the real life of the 
Cosmos. So far so good. But in his terror of 
seeming to dally with pantheism, he has de- 
liberately opposed the spiritual life to nature ;* 
and in order to maintain that opposition he has 
tried to limit the range of "nature" to the 



1 If Professor Eucken is to oppose the spiritual life to nature 
in general, he must also oppose it to human nature. And this 
he tries to do. But as he insists that the spiritual life is man 's 
"true being' ' and "genuine self," he finds himself in a 
serious dilemma; and in order to escape from it he prefixes to 
the phrase "human nature," whenever the spiritual life is to 
be exalted at its expense, the qualifying word mere. Thus he 
opposes the spiritual to the "merely human," to "mere hu- 
manity," to "the mere man," to "merely human culture," 
and so on. What these expressions are intended to mean, I 
have no idea. I doubt if they mean anything except that the 
writer has got himself into a fix and is trying to get out of it. 



38 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

lower levels of existence. But the concept re- 
fuses to be kept down to those levels; and its 
inherent buoyancy is such that it follows him 
to the higher levels — thereby compelling him 
to contradict himself again and again — and 
even rises with him, in his more incautious 
utterances, to the highest level of all. 

In their disparagement of nature the writers 
whom I have cited are all, though they may not 
know it, playing to the gallery. They have 
ratified and even accepted as authoritative 
what is really a basic conception — perhaps the 
basic conception — of popular thought. The 
strength of supernaturalism lies in the fact 
that it belongs to the philosophy of the people 
rather than of the schools. But this, as we 
shall now see, is also its weakness. 



IV 
THE GENESIS OF THE SUPERNATURAL 

THE foundations of supernaturalism seem 
to be laid in a quicksand of confused and 
self-contradictory thinking. How is it that the 
site was so badly chosen? Accepting the ger- 
minal definition of " nature' ' as correct, one 
can easily see how the idea of the supernatural 
has been evolved. Ordinary men, men who 
think without reflecting, would naturally apply 
the terms "nature' ' and "natural" to what 
was most familiar to them, whether in them- 
selves or their environment. Now what is most 
familiar to a man in himself is his body, with 
its various appetites and passions. And what 
is most familiar to him in his environment is 
the outward or material world. There would 
therefore be a tendency for human nature to 
mean the essential qualities or properties of 
the human animal, and for nature in general to 

39 



40 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

mean the essential qualities or properties of 
the outward or material world. 

It is true that from his earliest days man 
has been dimly aware of an inward and spirit- 
ual world, and an inward and spiritual life; 
and as, with the development of his spirit, his 
perception of these realities has become grad- 
ually clearer and stronger, one might have 
thought that the idea of nature would be grad- 
ually extended to them. But there was a reason 
why it should not be. When the people begin 
to philosophize, they instinctively take a static, 
not a dynamic, view of things. They have an 
eye for "being" rather than for "becoming." 
They recognize opposition; they do not recog- 
nize gradation. This tendency is known in 
philosophical circles as dualism. 1 It owes its 
origin to the reaction on thought of man's in- 
strument for thinking — language. Our names 
for large and familiar aspects of things fall as 
a rule into pairs. Such pairs are good and 
evil, pleasure and pain, light and darkness, true 

1 Dualism and monism are the face and reverse of the same 
tendency of thought. For the counter-tendency there is, as far 
as I know, no name. It might, perhaps, be spoken of as the 
doctrine of polarity or polar opposition. 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 41 

and false, right and wrong, swift and slow. In 
each of these antitheses we are apt to assume 
that the terms indicate alternative and mutu- 
ally exclusive states rather than antithetical 
processes. We are apt to assume, for example, 
that every man (as a moral agent) is either 
good or bad, that every proposition is either 
true or false, that every decision is either right 
or wrong, that every movement is either swift 
or slow. And we even carry the tendency so 
far as to relegate every man after his death 
either to Heaven or to Hell — either to absolute 
and infinite happiness or to absolute and in- 
finite misery. 

A little reflection will convince us that dual- 
ism — the static, as opposed to the dynamic view 
of things — is fundamentally fallacious. It is 
incorrect, for example, to say that every move- 
ment is either swift or slow. It would be more 
correct to say that every movement is both 
swift and slow, swift by comparison with what 
is slower than itself, slow by comparison with 
what is swifter than itself. It is possible to 
imagine a swifter movement than that of light ; 
and by comparison with that swifter movement 



42 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

the movement of light is slow. And it is 
possible to imagine a slower movement than 
that of a snail; and by comparison with that 
slower movement the movement of the snail 
is swift. Absolute swiftness — swiftness which 
has in it no alloy of its opposite — absolute slow- 
ness, absolute good, absolute evil, absolute 
happiness, absolute misery, the absolutely 
great, the absolutely little, — these ideals lie 
beyond our experience in that mysterious 
region which we call infinity. Within our ex- 
perience the opposites in a given antithesis 
always intermingle, each having in it some 
alloy, however slight, of the other ; but the two 
vary together in inverse proportion, the one 
rising as the other falls and falling as the other 
rises. What unites the two poles is the con- 
tinuous gradation that separates them; and it 
is to this continuous gradation, leading from 
infinity to counter-infinity and harmonizing 
unity of being with duality of aspect or direc- 
tion, that the average man is constitutionally 
blind. And not the average man only. Even 
so acute a thinker as Huxley could insist that 
there was no middle term between knowledge 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 43 

and ignorance ; and in support of this position 
could appeal to the analogy of light and dark- 
ness, the least glimmer of light being, he con- 
tended, as worthy to be spoken of as light and 
contrasted darkness, as the brightness of noon- 
day. This shows how strong is the pressure 
even on exceptional minds of the dualistic 
prejudice of popular thought. 

Let us go back to nature and the super- 
natural. The natural man, as popular thought 
interprets the phrase, is the animal, the lower 
self; and the world of nature is the material 
or outward world. But what of the inner life, 
what of the higher self, what of the spiritual 
world? If these do not belong to nature, to 
what order of things do they belong and by 
what generic name are they to be known? They 
announce themselves as being higher and more 
real than the things of "nature"; and as the 
realm of nature, owing to the static view that 
is taken of it, cannot be extended to include 
them, they must be thought of as supernatural. 
But here a difficulty confronts us. We cannot 
get away from what I have called the germinal 
definition of "nature" — "the essential proper- 



44 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

ties or qualities of a thing"; and in this, the 
true sense of the word, the concept of nature 
is as we have seen, universally applicable, even 
the supernatural world having a nature of its 
own. How then are we to delimit nature from 
the supernatural? Where does nature end and 
the supernatural begin? Are not love, sym- 
pathy, loyalty, fidelity, purity, truthfulness, 
unselfishness "essential properties and quali- 
ties" of the soul of man? And if so, do not 
they belong to human nature? But these 
qualities all belong to the inner life, the life 
of the spirit? Why, then, is the inner life to 
be spoken of as supernatural? Is there a point 
in its development, as it rises towards its own 
ideal, at which it ceases to be natural and be- 
comes worthy of the higher name? Surely not. 
We mean by the nature of a thing its essential 
qualities; but to bring a thing to maturity is 
to bring it nearer to what it really is, nearer 
to its own essence, and therefore nearer to its 
true nature. If sympathy is an essential 
property of man's being, unselfish love, which 
is the apotheosis of sympathy, must be a 
quintessential property. Are we, then, to say 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 45 

that sympathy is of nature, but that love, being 
higher, diviner, and more spiritual, is super- 
natural? We may say this — on one condition 
only, that by the supernatural we mean the 
higher developments, leading up to the consum- 
mation, of nature. 

But that is precisely what the word, as 
supematuralism interprets it, does not mean. 
On this point we must make our minds quite 
clear. The supernatural is the negation of 
nature, not the consummation of it. Apologists 
for "revealed religion" sometimes try to dis- 
arm criticism by saying that after all super- 
nature means no more than higher nature. If 
it does, it is not for them to say so. The 
supernatural, as they conceive it, bears witness 
to itself in the miraculous; and a miracle, in 
the orthodox interpretation of the word, in- 
volves a reversal or suspension of certain 
familiar laws of nature, not the manifestation 
of a higher natural law. Besides, the whole 
idea of a revealed or supernatural religion is 
based on the assumption that nature — nature 
in its totality — is corrupt and fallen and 
divorced from God, and that therefore the 



46 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

natural man cannot discern truth. If super- 
nature means no more than higher nature, why, 
do we oppose nature to grace, the natural 
world to the spiritual world, the natural man 
to the child of God, and so on? The theological 
opposition of the supernatural to nature is 
analogous to the dualistic opposition of light 
to darkness or of pleasure to pain. Would 
there be any sense in saying that light is only 
the higher darkness or that pleasure is only 
the higher pain? The supernaturalist who de- 
fines supernature as higher nature gives his 
own case away. For if I ascend to the highest 
conceivable level of the supernatural world 
and find that nature is still there, can I resist 
the inference that nature is all in all, and must 
I not, in the name of logical economy, go on 
to protest against the basic idea of the super- 
natural? 

The dualism of popular thought is proof 
against the sophistries of the professional 
apologist. If nature is the right name for the 
outward and visible world, including the 
physical being of man, and if the higher life 
of which man is fitfully aware in himself, and 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 47 

the higher realities to which that higher life 
bears witness, so far transcend the limits of 
what is outward and visible that a home must 
be found for them in some other world, then 
that other world must be spoken of as super- 
natural, not because it embraces the higher 
levels of nature, but because it is above nature, 
as high above it as the heavens are above the 
earth. For nature is a state, not a process; 
and being a state it cannot transcend itself, and 
must therefore be transcended (if at all) by 
some other and higher state. So the people 
argue; and their philosophy has at least the 
merit of being simple and sincere. But there 
its merits end. Booted as it is in a funda- 
mental fallacy — for the whole life of nature 
is self -transcendence — it could not fail to lead 
men astray. That it has done so, that it has 
confused their thoughts and demoralized their 
lives, I will now attempt to show. 



THE DISRUPTION OF THE UNIVERSE 

SUPERNATURALISM divides the Uni- 
verse 1 into two finite worlds separated by 
an infinite abyss. And as it finds a home for 
man in each of these worlds, it similarly di- 
vides his being into two dissevered selves. 
In doing this it carries to its logical conclusion 
the central teaching of popular thought. When 
we say that popular thought is static or dual- 
istic, we mean that what it sees in an anti- 
thesis is not the opposition of two counter-in- 
finities which are ever interpenetrating one 
another, but a challenge to choose between 

*Need I say that by "the Universe" I do not mean the 
physical universe only — "The sun, the moon, the stars, the 
seas, the hills and the plains?" I mean the synthesis of all 
worlds, all forms of life, all modes of existence, all actualities, 
all possibilities. I mean the totality of things gathered up 
and held together by imaginative thought. 

48 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 49 

alternative states. The idea of a state carries 
with it the idea of finality; and finality is the 
negation of infinitude. What happens, then, 
to the infinitude which is always inherent in 
each member of the antithesis? It is lost in 
the abysmal void which separates the alterna- 
tive states. 

This is what takes place when popular 
thought gets its way. As a rule, it does not 
get its way or gets it but in part. As a rule, 
its dualistic tendency is hampered, if not ef- 
fectively thwarted, by the actual conditions 
under which it works, by the stubborn facts 
with which it has to deal. In point of fact (to 
take an example) there is continuous grada- 
tion between absolute swiftness and absolute 
slowness ; and the attempt to treat the two op- 
posites as alternative states, one or other of 
which is predicable of every movement, if 
seriously made, would break down again and 
again. As it is, the inadequacy of our dualistic 
language to express gradation in this or any 
other antithesis has to be corrected, sometimes 
by the use of mathematical symbols, sometimes 
by tacit reference to the context, sometimes by 



50 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

the aid of qualifying words and phrases. But 
when popular thought, reinforced by popular 
imagination, passes beyond the frontiers of 
experience, it is free to go its way without let 
or hindrance, and we are then in a position to 
determine the law and calculate the goal of 
its movement. 

Such a field for the play of its tendencies is 
opened up to it by its speculations as to a 
future state. Following its natural bent, it 
sends every departed soul (once it has accepted 
the ideas of immortality and divine retribu- 
tion) either to salvation or to perdition, either 
to Heaven (with or without its ante-room, 
Purgatory) or to Hell. Consider what this 
means. There are probably as many degrees 
of moral worth as there have been men since 
the world began ; and in regard to their tempta- 
tions and opportunities no two men are or have 
ever been exactly alike. Yet in the requital 
of moral worth we recognize no middle term 
between two diametrically opposite and in- 
finitely dissevered extremes. And those ex- 
tremes are states, not processes. To enter 
Heaven is to be saved. To enter Hell is to be 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 51 

lost. Thereafter nothing matters. But the 
difference between Heaven and Hell, the dif- 
ference between infinite and everlasting hap- 
piness and infinite and everlasting misery, is 
unfathomable by any plummet of imagination 
or thought. By comparison with it, all differ- 
ences within the limits of Heaven or Hell, the 
difference between the happiness of the soul 
which has just escaped Hell and the happiness 
of the highest archangel, the difference between 
the misery of the soul which has just missed 
Heaven and the misery (if he is miserable) of 
the Prince of Darkness — are as nothing. So 
long as we think of Heaven and Hell as states, 
so long as we invest them with finality, all our 
efforts to raise to infinity the glory of the 
one state and the gloom of the other, are vain. 
The gulf which divides them drains into itself 
the infinitude of both the worlds, both the states 
of being, which it divides. 

The outrageous injustice of our dualistic 
eschatology ought to be self-evident. But be- 
cause the corrective pressure of experience is 
wanting, because there is no way of proving 
or disproving the current doctrines as to the 



52 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

future state, we cling tenaciously to our irra- 
tional assumption that, though there is infinite 
gradation in moral worth, in the requital of 
moral worth there is no middle term between 
the heaviest of all punishments and the highest 
of all rewards. 

In its cosmic speculations, the corrective 
pressure of experience being equally wanting, 
popular thought is equally free to follow its 
dualistic bent. Let us see what its division 
of the Universe into nature and the super- 
natural involves. It is the discovery of an in- 
ward and spiritual life in himself, a life which 
announces itself as higher and more real than 
the outward and physical life, that has led man 
to separate the supernatural world from 
nature. Looking upward from high to higher 
and from higher to highest, man arrives at 
last at the conception of One who is the summit 
and perfection of inward and spiritual life and 
therefore the fountain-head of reality. To this 
supreme object of aspiration and worship he 
gives the name of God. If the supernatural 
world is higher and more real than the natural 
world ; it must needs be the dwelling-place of 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 53 

him who is highest and most real — it must 
needs be the Heaven, or at least contain the 
Heaven, of God. Between nature and the 
supernatural world there is a great gulf fixed, 
a gulf of separation which cannot be bridged 
by any natural means. For if it could be, if 
natural intercourse between the two worlds 
were possible, the distinction between them 
would have effaced itself and the fallacy which 
is inherent in the root idea of the supernatural 
would be exposed. 

If, then, God dwells in the supernatural 
world, he must have withdrawn himself from 
nature, he must be on the far side of the "gap- 
ing gulf " which severs world from world. In 
the act of withdrawing himself from the 
natural world he ceases to be its indwelling 
life and becomes its Creator — the marker in 
the remote past of a finished handiwork, as 
opposed to the efficient principle of an eternal 
process. For the work of creation must have 
been completed within a definite period of time. 
Whether that period was seven solar days or 
seven cosmic eras matters nothing. What does 
matter is that it was a period, that it oame to 



54 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

an end, that God was then able to rest from 
his labor. The static view of the Universe 
which is of the essence of popular thought 
necessitated this conception. 

As God is the fountain-head of reality, his 
withdrawal to the supernatural world involved 
the withdrawal of reality from nature, the 
withdrawal of spirituality, of the higher life, 
of the inward light, of ideal good. Deprived 
of his indwelling presence nature became a 
ruin — fallen, accursed, intrinsically evil, a 
"body of death." Thenceforth a "state of 
nature" meant a state of potential evil and 
therefore of potential perdition; and the 
natural man became the ' ' enemy of God. ' ' The 
story of the Fall and the consequent forfeiture 
by man and nature of the divine grace and 
favor is the quasi-historical presentment, just 
as the doctrine of Original Sin is the quasi- 
scientific exposition, of this logically (and 
psychologically) predestined catastrophe. 

It is to this evil plight that dualism — the 
static view of the Universe — reduces nature. 
But what of the supernatural world? How has 
it been affected by its divorce from nature? 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 55 

We shall find that it, too, has suffered an irre- 
parable loss. For, however lavishly we may 
invest it with reality, spirituality, ideal good, 
there is one thing we cannot give it — actuality, 
the actuality which underlies experience, the 
actuality of what is perceptible, conceivable, 
imaginable. We sing hymns to ourselves 
about the wonders and delights of the super- 
natural Heaven; but in our heart of hearts 
we feel that it is a phantasmal order of things, 
a dreamland, a world of shadows and ghosts. 

And supernature, like nature, is a state, not 
a process. Being presumably perfect, it has 
no need to achieve perfection. Therefore it 
lacks that which gives life its savor — the ad- 
venture into the infinite, the "something ever- 
more about to be." The result of this is that, 
in our vision of it, the glories that we seek to 
conjure up are ever tending to melt away into 
a drab monotony, and that when we try to 
picture to ourselves the bliss of Heaven we 
find ourselves shrinking back from the prospect 
of immeasurable ennui. 

Such is the cosmology of popular thought. 
The Universe, the living Whole, is rent 



56 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

asunder. In place of an eternal process from 
pole to anti-pole we have two states of being 
— each the negation of the other — parted by 
an unfathomable abyss. Into that abyss drains 
unceasingly, from the side of nature reality — 
the reality of spiritual life and ideal good ; and 
from the side of the supernatural actuality — 
without which reality becomes an illusion, the 
spiritual degenerates into the immaterial, and 
ideal good is an end to which there is no way. 
The psychology of the people is determined 
by their cosmology. The being of man, like 
the being of the Universe, is rent asunder. On 
one side of the gulf of separation we have the 
lower self, the natural man, the state of 
nature, the child of wrath. On the other side 
we have the higher self, the spiritual man, the 
state of grace, the child of God. If the being 
of man, like that of every other living thing, 
came under the master law of growth, what a 
sorry plight we should all be in! For growth 
is self-realization; and as the natural man is 
a complex of evil potentialities, the process 
that brought him to maturity would be his un- 
doing, not his salvation. But the being of man, 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 57 

as dualism conceives it, does not come under 
the law of growth. Far from being an evolu- 
tionary process in which the possibilities of 
spiritual perfection are gradually realized, it 
is a discordant compound of two antagonistic 
states. Between those states there is, in the 
order of nature, no intercourse. Salvation, 
then, is achieved, not by outgrowing the lower 
self and realizing the higher, but by passing 
somehow or other from the state of nature to 
the state of grace. How is this to be done? 
How is the great gulf to be spanned? 



VI 

THE GOD WHO TAKES SIDES 

THE gulf is not to be spanned by the 
natural man. This much is clear. For 
nature is a state, not a process ; and the natural 
man is therefore incapable of self-transcend- 
ence. If he could transcend himself, the 
natural world (in which his life — for him — is 
central) would gradually invade, overrun, 
annex, and at last absorb into itself the super- 
natural world; and nature, both human and 
cosmic, would become all in all. If this catas- 
trophe is to be averted, if the dynamic view of 
things is not to triumph over the static, every 
attempt that may be made to span the gulf 
from the side of nature must be jealously re- 
sisted. 

How, then, I ask again, is the gulf to be 
spanned? Evidently, since nature is helpless, by 
supernatural agency. The supernatural world 

58 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 59 

is bound by no law or limitation of nature, and 
God can come to a man at his own good pleas- 
ure. But his dealings with man must be super- 
natural, not natural. H:z revelation of himself 
must be highly specialized. "What is uni- 
versal is natural. ' ' If he came to all men alike, 
his coming would be a revelation from within, 
not from without — the revelation of unsus- 
pected depths and realities in man himself, in 
human nature. Such a revelation would be no 
revelation. It would be a new stage in a 
natural process, not the irruption of a higher 
into a lower state. If the supernatural God 
is to reveal himself to men, he must choose 
special instruments for his purpose — a special 
people, special prophets, special scriptures, 
special Churches. To these he will commit his 
message to man ; and, as evidence of their hav- 
ing received a divine commission, he will give 
his prophets the power of reversing, suspend- 
ing, and otherwise upsetting the laws of 
nature. 

But here a practical difficulty arises. Belief 
in the miraculous is common to nearly all 
creeds. So is belief in a divine commission. 



60 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

Whatever may be the creed that he professes, 
the sincere believer is firmly convinced that his 
God is the true God and that the truth about 
God and man and nature has been revealed 
to the religious community to which he hap- 
pens to belong. To those who profess other 
religions he says in his heart: "My God is 
the true God. Your gods are false gods. God 
is on my side, not on yours. m Even within 
the limits of Christendom each of the different 
religious bodies lays claim to the special favor 
of the Christian God. As for the "heathen" — 
the three-fourths of the human race who are 
non-Christian — they know not God. 

I have given my reasons for thinking that the 
idea of the supernatural is fundamentally fal- 
lacious. I have suggested that it owes its 
origin to the static or dualistic view of things 
which is characteristic of the popular phi-' 

*Keligions are not all equally intolerant. The degree of 
intolerance seems to vary directly with the degree in which 
the philosophy of the religion is impregnated with super- 
naturalism. In the Far East there is incomparably more 
tolerance than in the Near East and the West; and the reason 
of this is, I think, that the dominant philosophy of the Far 
East, which is nothing if not religious, has ever tended to 
substitute for belief in the supernatural belief in the essential 
spirituality of nature. 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 61 

losophy and which results from the reaction of 
language (with its inherent limitations) on 
thought. I have tried to show that the idea 
works badly as an idea; that it entangles the 
thought and confuses the speech of those who 
seek to expound it; that, as a theory of the 
Universe, it gives us two dead worlds in place 
of one living Cosmos, two states of being — one 
soulless and the other phantasmal — in place of 
one infinite, self-evolving, self-transcending 
life; that, as a theory of the soul, it destroys 
the unity and inward harmony of man's life; 
that it opens up an unfathomable abyss be- 
tween the natural man (the child of wrath) and 
the spiritual man (the child of God) ; that it 
belittles and besmirches human nature, denying 
to it the right to rise above itself towards its 
own perfection, by realizing the infinite possi- 
bilities which are its birthright. 

These arguments have some weight, I think. 
But there is another which outweighs them all. 
The idea of the supernatural works badly in 
the sphere of conduct, of practical life. The 
belief in a God who takes sides (when its good 
has been weighed against its evil) is perhaps 



62 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

the most demoralizing influence that has ever 
been brought to bear upon man's life; for it 
tempts men to confound absorption in self with 
devotion to God, and therefore to dedicate to 
the service of Heaven vices which really savor 
of Hell. 

The God whom Christendom worships is un- 
doubtedly a God who takes sides. On this 
point theology and popular belief are at one. 
How did such a deity come to be worshipped? 
Does Christendom owe him to Christ? I think 
not. I think if we are to determine his origin 
we must go much further back. Let us go far 
back, then. Let us go back to the beginnings 
of religion. The basis of all religious faith is 
man's instinctive and inalienable belief in the 
reality — the dynamic reality — of his own self. 
With this subconscious belief as his starting 
point, he filled the world, in his search for the 
sources of causation, with replicas of his own 
spirit. Each city, each clan, each household 
had its own tutelary deity. Each operation of 
nature had its own presiding genius. As man 
brought order into his own social life and order 
into his views of nature, so he brought order 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 63 

into the chaos of deities with which he had 
peopled the world. As families grouped them- 
selves into tribes, and tribes into cities, as 
nations were built up by the force either of 
conquest or of agglomeration, the tutelary 
deities of the household and the clan had to 
acknowledge the overlordship of civic and na- 
tional gods. And as the larger aspects and 
obscurer laws of nature began to reveal them- 
selves to man in and through the host of 
detailed phenomena which surrounded him, the 
lesser deities — the Fauns and Satyrs, the 
Naiads and Dryads and Oreads — had to ac- 
knowledge the overlordship of the gods of light 
and darkness, of earth and sky and sea. This 
process of gradual development was rudely in- 
terrupted by the people to whom the West and 
the Near East owe their religion. The whole 
hierarchy of deities was dethroned by Israel in 
favor of one living and everlasting God, the 
Creator and Euler of all existent things. This 
lonely Deity had at his call the ordered hosts 
of Heaven — angels, archangels, cherubim and 
seraphim; but they were his ministers, not his 
sub-gods. For he said to his worshipper with 



64 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

stern emphasis: "Thou shalt have none other 
gods but me." 

In the vision of the supreme Lord and 
Master of the Universe, Israel touched for a 
moment the conception of cosmic totality and 
unity. But the moment of attainment was the 
moment of recoil. Israel touched that sublime 
conception only to betray and degrade it. For, 
in the .excess of his collective egoism, he placed 
his own national deity on the throne of the 
Universe. The truth is that at his highest 
level he was a seer, not a thinker; and that, 
while his moods of poetic insight and elevation 
lasted, he was in rebellion, so to speak, against 
his normal self. When those moods were over, 
his normal self re-asserted its supremacy, and 
his inspired theory of the Universe became 
subordinated to a prosaic scheme of national 
life. The chief function of the Creator of the 
ends of the earth, as Israel then conceived it, 
was to legislate for his chosen people, to take 
thought for their welfare, to direct their go- 
ings, to administer the affairs of their com- 
monwealth. And Israel was well content that 
this should be so. In Jewry was God known, 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 65 

and his name was great in Salem. But beyond 
the frontiers of Jewry dwelt the Gentiles, the 
heathen people who knew not the true God and 
were therefore outside the pale of salvation. 
And Israel was well content that they should 
remain in the shadow of God's light. Of all 
lines of cleavage between man and his fellow- 
men this was surely the deepest. The people 
that could claim for itself a monopoly of the 
grace and favor of the one and only God had 
separated itself by the most awful of all 
abysses from the rest of mankind. The re- 
ligion which centered in that most arrogant of 
all assumptions might easily degenerate into 
the consecration to God of the nation's selfish- 
ness and pride. 

Because Christ, for purposes of argument, 
appealed to the Jewish Scriptures and seemed 
to regard them as authoritative, and because 
he seemed to identify himself (according to 
his reporters) with the Messiah of Jewish 
prophecy and expectation, Christianity ac- 
cepted the God of the Jews as the God of the 
Universe; and the consequent confusion be- 
tween that jealous, vindictive, and bloodthirsty 



66 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

autocrat and the all-loving Father whom Christ 
revealed to mankind has been the evil genius 
of Christendom. For, with their national 
deity, Christianity inherited the separatism 
and intolerance of the Jewish people. A bale- 
ful heritage! Intolerance is the negation of 
sympathy, of charity, of love; and when it is 
solemnly dedicated to the service of God, its 
power of evil is multipled tenfold. Chris- 
tianity and Mahometanism, the two world-re- 
ligions that sprang from the parent stem of 
Judaism, are of «all religions the most intoler- 
ant. When the Christian Church ceased to be 
persecuted, it began to persecute. The gospel 
of Mahomet was propagated with fire and 
sword. The wars between the Crescent and 
the Cross spread death and desolation for more 
than a thousand years. In the eyes of the 
Christian three-fourths of his fellow men are 
" heathen.' * In the eyes of the Moslem four- 
fifths of his fellow men are "infidels." Within 
the limits of Christendom (and also, I doubt 
not, of Islam) the same spirit prevails. Church 
anathematizes Church, and sect separates it- 
self from sect. For centuries heresy was 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 67 

punished with the rack and the stake. For 
centuries Catholics and Protestants waged war 
on each other with a vindictive cruelty which 
has never been surpassed. 1 

Nor is the claim to have God on one's side 
confined to the Churches and sects. In the en- 
joyment of the divine favor there are cross 
divisions in Christendom. Germany is, I be- 
lieve, three-fifths Protestant and two-fifths 
Catholic; but the German Emperor, speaking 
for his nation, does not hesitate to say that in 
the present war "God [who for the moment 
is no respecter of creeds] is our open and un- 
conditional ally." These words set one think- 
ing. When one remembers with what aims 
Germany began the war and in what spirit 

1 Archbishop Mannix, the acknowledged head of the Koman 
Catholic Church in Australia, speaking in public, has recently 
11 claimed for his Church that it was justified in employing 
physical coercion in the treatment of heretics." Archbishop 
Mannix is an honest man. From its own point of view the 
Catholic Church was fully justified in sending heretics to the 
rack and the stake. But the greater the justification the 
greater the condemnation. A dogmatic religion is always in- 
tolerant in spirit; and the transition from intolerance in spirit 
to intolerance in action is in the main a matter of ways and 
means. The Catholic Church would persecute heresy to-morrow 
if the means to do so were at its disposal and if the spirit 
of the age was on its side* 



68 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

she has waged it, one is disposed to wonder 
at the blasphemous audacity of this claim. Yet 
it is but a sample of the delirious egomania 
with which the cult of the God who takes sides 
too often afflicts its votaries. The Lutheran 
pastors of Germany, more candid or more 
logical than their Emperor, have set forth in 
their sermons the ethical implications of his 
theology. According to the Eev. Fritz Philippe, 
of Berlin, "Germany's divine mission is to 
crucify humanity. It is therefore the duty of 
German soldiers to strike blows of merciless 
violence ; they must kill, they must burn, they 
must work wholesale destruction. Half meas- 
ures would be impious ; there must be thorough 
war without compassion." According to the 
Eev. Dr. Lobet, of Leipzig, "we [Germans] 
are carrying out divine wishes in destroying 
our enemies and establishing our own power 
... we must, therefore, fight the wicked by all 
possible means; their sufferings must please 
us ; their cries of ^anguish must fall upon deaf 
German ears. There can be no compromise 
with the forces of hell, no pity for the slaves 
of Satan." Such ravings as these have often 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 69 

resounded from German pulpits. Whatever 
may be thought of them as Christian doctrine, 
their logic is not seriously at fault. If God 
is fighting on our side in a life-and-death 
struggle, can any treatment be too severe for 
his enemies — who are also ours? Are not 
cruelty, rapacity, lustfulness, perfidy, treach- 
ery, if their victims are indeed the enemies of 
God, justifiable and even acceptable in God's 
sight? Does not the end sanctify the means 
and transform into virtues what would other- 
wise be execrable vices? So the Lutheran 
pastors seem to have argued; and if we grant 
their premises we must admit that there is 
some method in their madness. But we may 
perhaps suspect the soundness of the premises, 
of which criminal lunacy is the logical outcome. 
Nor is it only with Churches and nations that 
the supernatural God takes sides. Individuals 
compete actively for his support and favor. 
The God of the Jews was an Asiatic autocrat ; 
and this conception was duly inherited by 
Christianity. In the heart of the average 
Christian, God "the great King" has over- 
shadowed God the Father, and fear and cupid- 



70 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

ity have cast out love. The attitude of the 
believer towards his deity is that of a courtier 
towards an absolute monarch. But a courtier 
is a selfish individualist who cares nothing for 
the welfare of his fellow- subjects, and plays 
on principle for his own hand. His one desire, 
while he stands well with his .sovereign, is to 
enrich or otherwise aggrandize himself. Nine- 
tenths *of the prayers which are addressed to 
God are essentially .selfish. They are petitions 
for gifts and favors which God — conceived of 
as an omnipotent conjurer — is supposed to be 
able to dispense at will. The most precious 
of these gifts is that of salvation. The desire 
for salvation is so radically individualistic that 
even the idea .of being saved through member- 
ship of a favored Church has failed to social- 
ize it. The devotion of the churchman to his 
Church reflects the force of his conviction that 
it, and it alone, holds the keys to the gate of 
Heaven. That it should let him in is his chief 
concern. What happens to his fellow-church- 
men is a matter which does not seriously inter- 
est him. The conditions of salvation are known 
to them. Let them take care of themselves. 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 71 

This attitude on his part is the natural result 
of his over-confident conviction that he belongs 
to a divinely commissioned and divinely pro- 
tected Church. The patriot lives and dies for 
his country because it needs his services. But 
the Church which is assured of the favor of 
God does not need the services of its votaries. 
What it can do for them is the thing that mat- 
ters, not what they can do for it. 

Individualism in religion must needs gen- 
erate individualism in the conduct of life. If 
it is "each for himself " in the general scramble 
for salvation, it must needs be "each for him- 
self ' in the general scramble for the "good 
things (including the necessaries) of life." 
And in the latter, as in the former scramble, 
we expect God to be on our side. Even in our 
economic disputes we expect him to have our 
particular interests at heart. I once heard a 
devout Christian say, while a certain dock 
strike was in progress, that if the dockers won 
she would cease to believe in God. Savages 
are said to beat and otherwise maltreat their 
gods when their prayers to them are not an- 
swered. But the savage does not pretend that 



72 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

his god is the God of the Universe* The Chris- 
tian does. 

So long as these things are so, so long as 
individualism in mundane matters is reinforced 
by a continuous influx of individualism from 
what is supposed to be the highest level of 
our being, for so long will our social life con- 
tinue to be based on competition rather than 
co-operation, and the dream of pan-human 
unity will continue to be an intellectual idea 
rather than a sentiment and a moral force. 

These are some of the fruits of the cult of 
the God who takes sides. "What, then, it will 
be asked, is to be our attitude towards God? 
If we may not ask him to be on our side, to 
take up our cause, to fight for us against our 
enemies, to fulfill our desires, to be our refuge 
in times of trouble, to serve us in these and 
other ways— what may we do? There is one 
thing which we may do, or rather which we 
must do. We must place ourselves on the side 
of God. We must fight for him against his 
arch-enemy and ours — against self. How to 
wage and win that fight has been taught us by 
Christ. 



vn 

THE UNITY OF THE UNIVEESE 

WHILE Israel was wavering between a 
selfishly national and a sublimely cos- 
mic conception of God and was vainly trying 
to harmonize the two conceptions, the sages of 
India were beginning to penetrate the secret 
of the Universe. The secret of the Universe 
is that it is a universe, a cosmos, an organic 
whole. And it is an organic whole, just as 
man and every other living thing is an organic 
whole, in virtue of its own indwelling life. 
That indwelling life is the creator and sustainer 
of the Universe, its ruler and organizer, its 
efficient and its final cause. But it creates and 
sustains, it rules and organizes it from within, 
not, as Israel had imagined, from without. 

The Sages of the Upanishads grasped this 
supreme truth; and they drew from it the in- 
evitable inference that the life of which they 

73 



74 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

were conscious in themselves was the indwell- 
ing, the all-controlling, the divine life which 
animates the Universe, and therefore that the 
soul of each of us was ultimately and ideally- 
one with the soul of all things, with the spirit 
of God. 

To grasp this truth was one thing; to make 
it available for the everyday lives of ordinary 
men was another thing. If the Universe is a 
living whole, then to realize his oneness with 
that life, to make it in some sort his own — not 
by possessing it, but by losing himself in it — 
must needs be the way of salvation for each 
individual man. 

But how was this conception to be trans- 
formed into a rule of life? The ceremonial 
solution of the problem which we owe to 
Brahminism was no solution. It cut men off 
from the real source of inspiration and guid- 
ance, from vital contact with spiritual truth, 
and it imposed on them the yoke of a spiritual 
tyranny, perhaps the deadliest that the world 
has ever known. 

The practical or ethical solution which we 
owe to Buddha was an immense advance on 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 73 

this. The ethical consequences of the supreme 
truth which the spiritual consciousness of In- 
dia had discovered were firmly grasped by 
Buddha, and were embodied by him in that 
wonderful scheme of life which he called ' ' The 
Path." The master-principle of that scheme 
was self -transcendence ; and the Path led at 
last to the complete suppression of self, and 
therefore (though Buddha was silent on this 
point) to oneness with the Universal Self. It 
also led at last to a goal w^hich Buddha called 
Nirvana. That he meant by Nirvana oneness 
with the Universal Self is more than probable ; 
but the evidence for this hypothesis is wholly 
internal. Knowing, as he had good reason to 
do, how easily the speculative pursuit of ideal 
truth degenerates into metaphysical wrangling 
and hair-splitting, Buddha bade his disciples 
concern themselves with the Path, and the Path 
only; and though he glorified Nirvana and 
presented it to them as an end in itself, he 
made no attempt to reveal to them the nature 
of the goal to which he taught them to aspire. 
That was a mistake for which Buddhism has 
paid dear. In deliberately withholding from 



76 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

his disciples the highest of all ethical motives, 
Buddha left a gap in his teaching into which 
lower motives were bound sooner or later to 
find their way. As time went on, the negative 
side of the suppression of self — escape from 
the " whirlpool of rebirth" through the extinc- 
tion of desire — came to count for more in the 
eyes of those who walked in the Path than the 
positive side, and Nirvana came at last to bear 
a meaning which seems to our Western minds 
to be scarcely distinguishable from annihila- 
tion. 

In China the Taoist sages, Lao-Tze and 
Chuang-Tze, were familiar with the idea of 
cosmic unity. They meant by Tao what we 
mean by nature when we use the word in its 
widest and deepest sense ; they meant the way 
of the Universe, "the pure eternal course of 
things." But their practical interpretation of 
the idea was inharmonious and therefore in- 
adequate; for their complete reliance on the 
silent efficacy of Tao led them to undervalue 
the part that human activity plays in the drama 
of the Universe ; and their ethical teaching was 
in consequence too quietistic for ordinary men. 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 77 

Their great contemporary, Confucius, by 
whose maxims China has regulated her con- 
duct through all the intervening centuries, was 
an agnostic moralist. " While you cannot see 
men, how can you see spirits?" " While you 
do not know life, what can you know about 
death?" are two of his sayings. What was 
great in him, as in his illustrious follower 
Mencius, was his faith in human nature. 
"Man's nature was from God. The harmoni- 
ous acting out of it was obedience to the will 
of God; and the violation of it was disobedi- 
ence." 1 But it was faith in the actualities, 
rather than the ideal possibilities of human 
nature, on which he based his scheme of life. 
1 ' Man as he is and the duties belonging to him 
in society were all that he concerned himself 
about." 1 Great as has been the influence of 
his scheme of life, it cannot be said that it 
embodied any theory of the Universe or owed 
its motive force to the latent presence of any 
cosmic emotion. 
We can now see how things stood when 

1 ' l Confucius ' ' : Article in l ' Encyclopaedia Britannica, ' ' 11th 
edition, by Rev. James Legge. 



78 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

Christ came into the world. The idea of the 
unity of the Universe was still waiting for an 
adequate interpretation. In Israel prophecy 
had grasped the idea, but legalism had dishon- 
ored and betrayed it. In the Far East the 
Sages of India had penetrated to the heart of 
the idea and had deduced from it its psy- 
chological consequences. But they had not 
followed it out into the sphere of practical life. 
One great teacher had indeed embodied it in 
a scheme of life; but as a moralist he had 
deliberately disconnected the idea from the 
scheme. For the rest, the gulf between doc- 
trine and practice was wide and deep. What 
was needed was to distil from the idea a 
supreme ethical principle. If this was to be 
done, the idea must be emotionally appre- 
hended, not only by poets and prophets but 
also by ordinary men. The supreme truth must 
somehow or other be transmuted into supreme 
desire. What the world was waiting for, then, 
was the emotional presentment of the idea of 
cosmic unity, the bringing it home to the hearts 
of men. To do this was the work of Christ. 



VIII 
GOD THE FATHER 

THE conception of God which Christ in- 
herited from the people into whose 
tradition he was born is familiar to all of us, 
though less familiar than it would be if dis- 
passionate criticism of it were not forbidden 
by Christian orthodoxy. Jehovah (or Yah- 
weh) was the most hybrid deity that has ever 
been worshiped. On the one hand, he was the 
national deity of the Jews. On the other hand, 
he was the God of the Universe. On the one 
hand, he was the ruler of his people Israel, 
on whom he had concentrated all his interest 
in mankind — their patron, their lawgiver, their 
leader, their task-master, their judge, their 
executioner — an irresponsible Oriental despot 
with many of the characteristics and even 
vices of his type ; more than human in that he 
was invisible, all-powerful, and immortal; 

79 



80 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

human or less than human in that he was 
irascible, vindictive, cruel, intolerant, treacher- 
ous, unjust; a partial God; a jealous God; a 
God of wrath ; a God whose very mercies were 
strictly covenanted; a God to be feared rather 
than loved. On the other hand, he was the 
Creator of the ends of the earth; by his word 
were the heavens made; he was "high above 
the nations/ ' which "were counted as the small 
dust of the balance"; he was a God of power 
and majesty — "the heavens declare the glory 
of God, and the firmament showeth his handi- 
work"; a God of wonder and mystery — "his 
way is in the deep, and his path in the great 
waters, and his footsteps are not known"; a 
God of truth and justice, of purity and right- 
eousness, of lovingkindness and mercy; a God 
who is found of them that sought him not; 
a God whose compassions fail not but are new 
every morning; a God in the hearts of whose 
worshippers love becomes adoration and fear 
loses itself in awe. 

To harmonize or even to co-ordinate these 
discordant conceptions of God was and is im- 
possible. Israel ended by subordinating the 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 81 

cosmic to the national conception. Christianity- 
has allowed the confusion between the two 
(which it has translated into a notation of its 
own) to paralyze the religious sensibility and 
activity of Christendom. Had it followed the 
lead of its Founder, it would have avoided this 
impasse. For Christ solved the problem with 
that spiritual sagacity which was one of his 
leading characteristics, and which never failed 
him. Passing lightly by the national deity, if 
he did not actually ignore him, he gave the 
whole of his love and devotion to the God of 
the Universe. And because the God of the 
Universe, as Christ thought of him, had in 
him no hardening, narrowing, vulgarizing alloy 
of nationalism, because his gifts were all free 
and his mercies all "uncovenanted," the love 
and devotion that Christ gave him were un- 
stinted in measure and wholly pure and disin- 
terested. 

In other words, the God of the Universe, 
being freed from the limitations which the cult 
of a national deity had imposed on him, trans- 
formed himself, in the heart and mind of 
Christ, from an all-powerful despot into an 



82 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

all-loving Father. It was as their autocratic 
Lord and Master that the " chosen people" 
thought of the God of Israel ; and it was as the 
autocratic Lord and Master of heaven and 
earth, of land and sea, that they thought of 
him when they passed, in their moments of 
poetic rapture, from the national to the cosmic 
conception of God. In the act of turning away 
from the national conception Christ trans- 
formed the cosmic : he recalled God, as it were, 
from his exile in the supernatural Heaven and 
restored him to nature and to man. The God 
who gave his love and care to all men and all 
things, and not to one land and one people 
only; whose rain fell on the just and the un- 
just; who clothed the lilies of the field with a 
raiment of more than kingly beauty ; who knew 
when a sparrow fell to the ground; who num- 
bered the very hairs of our heads — was some- 
thing more than the maker and ruler of the 
Universe. His relation to it was far more 
close, subtle, vital, penetrative, pervasive than 
that of a maker to his handiwork or of a king 
to the realm which he rules. It was the rela- 
tion of life to the manifestation of life, a rela- 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 83 

tioti which was only one degree removed from 
identity. If God was still to be personified — 
and to have broken with that tradition would 
have been a highly dangerous experiment — a 
more natural and intimate bond of union than 
that which Israel had imagined must be found 
to symbolize the relations of God to nature 
and to man. And what bond of union is so 
natural or so intimate as that which unites a 
father to his children? 

For Christ, as for the sages of India, God 
was the life and soul of the Universe, the life 
of its life, and the soul of its soul ; and he was 
therefore the light that lighteth every man who 
cometh into the world, lighting him from 
within, not, as the pillar of fire lighted the path 
of Israel, from without. But, instead of pre- 
senting this conception to us in its abstract 
form, he translated it into the simple but poetic 
language of everyday life. He taught us to 
think of the Life to which man owes his life, 
of the Soul to which man owes his soul, as the 
loving Father "of whom are all things and 
we in him," and so brought the idea of cosmic 
unity and totality home to our hearts. And 



84 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

he kept his conception of God in the region of 
poetry, of emotional insight. He did not 
theorize about it. He did not try to system- 
atize it. In this he showed his deep wisdom; 
and it would have been well if Christendom 
had followed his example. The metaphysical 
bias which Greek philosophy, then in its de- 
cadence, gave to Christian thought and feeling 
has not yet been corrected. We still puzzle 
ourselves with riddles which cannot be guessed. 
We ask ourselves whether God is personal or 
impersonal, whether he is immanent or tran- 
scendent, whether he foreknows and predes- 
tines the future, whether he is conditioned by 
Time and Space, whether he hears and answers 
prayer. These questions and such as these 
are (as Buddha is reported to have said) "a 
jungle, a wilderness, a puppet-show and a 
fetter/ 9 The attempt to solve them has caused 
much misery and bloodshed, and is still an 
active principle of strife. "Men become per- 
sonal when logic fails"; and when arguments 
are in the nature of things inconclusive, the 
disputants try to convince one another by more 
forcible but less rational methods. In Asia 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 85 

and Africa Christianty died of too much meta- 
physics, accompanied, as it was bound to be, 
by too much ill-temper and ill-will. Christ 
drew a veil over all those insoluble problems. 
Cannot we be content to follow his lead? 

Alas ! however undogmatic, however agnostic 
(in the truer and deeper sense of the word) 
we may resolve to be, certain questions will 
obtrude themselves on our thought. There are 
many believers, including some who count them- 
selves open-minded and progressive, who find 
strength and consolation in the "blessed 
truth' ' that the God of the Universe is a per- 
son, and would feel that they had lost their 
hold on religion if their faith in that dogma 
were seriously shaken. A person ! One among 
many, I presume. Well, if our choice lies be- 
tween worshipping a person, and worshipping 
physical force, it is better, I suppose, that we 
should continue to personify God. But surely the 
truth about God's personality is that it infinitely 
transcends all our experiences of personality — 
so far transcends them that it almost savors of 
blasphemy to apply the term "personal," with 
its human associations and limitations, to the 



86 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

Most High. If personal at all, God must needs 
be the fountain-head of personality; and if 
this is so, to think of God as a person is as 
though we should think of the ocean as one of 
the many effluent and refluent rivers that it 
feeds. In thinking of God, with love and de- 
votion in our hearts, as the All-Father, we go 
as far in the direction of personifying him as 
we can safely go. To go beyond that, to deal 
in a quasi-scientific spirit with the idea of 
divine personality, as if it were a conundrum 
in metaphysics or psychology, is to expose an 
essentially spiritual conception to the risk of 
being materialized, externalized, vulgarized, 
robbed of its poetry, its subtlety, its fluidity, 
its persuasive charm, its dynamic force. And 
not to this risk only. Experience has fully 
proved that the personal God of popular theol- 
ogy degenerates almost inevitably into the 
God who takes sides. 

There is another question which, as I have 
helped to raise it, I may fairly be asked to 
consider. What proof can I give of the unity 
of the Universe? None. What the Universe 
may be in itself is no concern of mine. But I 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 87 

can prove that it belongs to human nature to 
postulate its unity. For if the worship of the 
One God is not the outcome of a supernatural 
revelation, it must be the outcome of a gen- 
uinely natural instinct. And as the king sym- 
bolizes the unity of his kingdom, so does the 
One God symbolize the unity fef the Universe. 
Nay, he does more than symbolize it. He con- 
stitutes it. The Supernatural God, as the King 
of the Universe, may claim to be the center 
and summit of its quasi-national life. But the 
God of Nature is the indwelling life, through 
the evolution of which the Universe transforms 
itself from "an aggregate" into a "whole." 
In what relation, then, if we reject super- 
naturalism, does God stand to the world of 
our experience? We cannot answer this ques- 
tion. That God is the life and soul of the 
world, that when we worship him we affirm our 
faith in the unity and spirituality of the world, 
that in virtue of God (if I may use such an 
expression) the world of our experience is, at 
heart, the world of which we dream — this much 
we may perhaps venture to say; but beyond 
this we cannot go. 



88 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

But why do we disquiet ourselves with these 
vain speculations? The emotional solution of 
the supreme problem, issuing in due course in 
the practical solution, is, after all, the only 
one that counts. The relation of God to the 
Universe centers, for us men, in the relation 
of God to man. If we would know what that 
relation is, if we would know what God is to 
us, what God means for us, let us follow, as 
best we may, Christ's precept and example; let 
us love God with all our heart, with all our 
mind, with all our soul, and with all our 
strength — and let us try to do his will. 



IX 

THE SUPEEME CHOICE 

TO do God's will is to live for the Universe. 
Let ns first think of God as ruling the 
Universe from without. Let us think of him 
as the King who is also the Father of his 
people. Such a deity would surely live for his 
kingdom and his people. The care of them 
would be his first and last concern. Their well- 
being would be his will. It follows that if 
we would prove our devotion to God, the King 
and the Father, if we would do his will, we 
must work for the well-being of his kingdom 
and his people. We must live, as he does, for 
the Universe. And if we identify God more 
closely with the Universe, if we think of him 
as ruling it from within, as being its supreme 
reality, its inmost life, we can take a shorter 
cut to the same conclusion. For in that case 



90 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

to live for God is to live for the Universe, and 
to live for the Universe is to live for God. 

To live for the Universe, to live for God's 
kingdom, to live for God's people — is this the 
end which Christianity has set before the 
Christian when it has called upon him to do 
God's will? In theory, perhaps Yes: in prac- 
tice, alas! No. The cult of the supernatural 
God has caused the despot in the Deity to over- 
shadow the Father ; and this again has caused 
the courtier, the competitor for God's favor, to 
overshadow the patriot in the heart of the de- 
votee. But to play the courtier to God in the 
hope of being " saved," in the hope of escaping 
the doom of eternal punishment, is to raise in- 
dividualism to its highest power. Such an 
attitude has too long passed as piety. The time 
has come for us to recognize its inherent selfish- 
ness. As in an earthly kingdom, so in the 
Heavenly. Patriotism is the true loyalty. If 
we would serve the King, we must serve his 
people. 

Whatever Christianity may have taught, the 
teaching of Christ on this point is clear. To 
each of us the Universe reveals itself, first and 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 91 

foremost, as Humanity, as "one's neighbor." 
When Christ had formulated the first great 
commandment, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy 
God with all thy heart, with all thy mind, with 
all thy soul, and with all thy strength," he went 
on to say, "The second is like unto it: Thou 
shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." To love 
one's neighbor as oneself is to love and live 
for Humanity; and to live for Humanity is to 
go far towards living for the Universe. 

The final choice, then, for each of us is be- 
tween living for the Universe and living for 
self. It will be said that this choice is too wide 
to come into our daily lives. And it is doubt- 
less true that the choice, as I have stated it, 
seldom, if ever, presents itself to our conscious- 
ness. But in the first place, one is often called 
upon — or so it seems — to choose between living 
for self and living for God ; and for one whose 
loyalty to God takes the form of patriotism 
rather than of courtiership, to live for God is, 
as we have seen, to live for the Universe. And 
in the second place, the choice between self and 
the Universe does present itself again and 
again to our subliminal conscience ; and, as the 



92 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

widest and most ultimate of all choices, it may 
be said to control and regulate all the lesser 
choices that we are called upon to make. 

I will try to explain what I mean. He who 
would walk in the path which Christ has marked 
out for us must be ready to give disinterested 
service to whatever community has the right 
to claim his service. Such devotion is the be- 
ginning of religion; and, if the community is 
large enough, it is also the end. But the de- 
votee must take care that the devotion which 
he gives is disinterested. If his material in- 
terests coincide with those of the community, 
there will be a danger lest, in living for the 
community, he should really be living for self. 
The loyalty of a robber to his gang, of a pirate 
to his shipmates or his captain, of a swindler 
to his confederates, may be above suspicion, 
but it is selfish and even criminal at heart. If 
devotion to a community is to remain disin- 
terested, the claims of higher and wider com- 
munities — the claim, in the last resort, of the 
highest and widest of all communities — must 
be duly recognized. The patriot may be ready 
to lay down his life for his country; but if he 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 93 

cannot rise to the conception of a larger com- 
monwealth, if he cannot, on occasion, subor- 
dinate the interests of his country to the in- 
terests of Humanity, there will be an element 
of selfishness in his patriotism which will end 
(as the case of Germany has fully proved) by 
corrupting it and him. 

Yet even the "enthusiasm of humanity," 
high though it be among motives, is not the 
highest of all. However wide may be the com- 
munity that claims our service, if our devotion 
to it is to be absolutely disinterested, our 
reason for serving it must be that in our heart 
of hearts, consciously or unconsciously, we 
have already dedicated ourselves to the service 
of the widest community of all. The service 
of mankind is a noble end of action; but it is 
not an end in itself. The Kingdom of God is 
a larger commonwealth than the Kingdom of 
Man; and though its claim on our devotion 
may seem to be less insistent, the pressure 
which it exerts is never relaxed. Let us take 
the case of a man who is old and infirm — dying 
perhaps of a lingering disease — in any case a 
seemingly useless member of society and a 



94 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

burden to all his friends. The consciousness 
of his own uselessness and helplessness may- 
be so overwhelming that his very sense of duty 
to Humanity may tempt him at last to take 
his own life. In the strength of what higher 
motive will he resist this temptation? It has 
been well said that "when life is more terrible 
than death it is the truer courage to dare to 
live." 1 But it is not because life is terrible to 
him that he wishes to quit it, but because he 
feels that his life is useless and purposeless, 
that it is a minus quantity, so to speak, that in 
prolonging it he is wasting the time and labor 
of those who minister to him, and therefore 
rendering a disservice to his fellow men. Why, 
then, will he resist the temptation that has as- 
sailed him? Because he will feel that, some- 
how or other, a message has come to him from 
a larger world — a message warning him that 
if he takes his own life he will be deserting a 
post which has been assigned to him, and that 
in doing so he will perhaps be unfitting himself 
for work in another life, and so thwarting plans 
for his future which are too complex and far- 

^ir T. Browne, "Religio Medici.' ' 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 95 

reaching for him to understand. As he listens 
to the warning voice, he will realize that the 
problem which confronts him has a wider 
scope and a deeper significance than he had 
imagined, that in the last resort he has to 
choose between loyalty and disloyalty to God, 
between living for God's Universe and living 
— the paradox is unavoidable — for self. 

It is to this choice that we come at last when 
our motives have been fully unraveled, when 
the ultimate springs of action have been laid 
bare. To live for the Universe is of course to 
live for God. Why, then, it will be asked, do 
I not use the more familiar phrase? Because 
it is too familiar. Because it seldom rings true 
in our hearts. Because the appeal that it 
makes to us is too often false. It is said that 
familiarity breeds contempt; and it certainly 
seems to do something akin to this when, in the 
course of our thoughts about ourselves and 
God, we allow our minds to be dominated by 
phrases which once meant more than they mean 
now. Suggest to a man that he should dedicate 
his life to the service of the Universe; and he 
will answer, "What nonsense! The affairs of 



96 THE SECRET OP THE CROSS 

the Universe are no concern of mine." Yet 
the same man will talk glibly and familiarly 
about doing things "to the honor and glory of 
God." That shows how parochial is our con- 
ception of God, and what need there is for us 
to enlarge it. The Jews flattered themselves 
that the well-being of their nation was God's 
main concern. We Christians are apt to think 
that God takes a special interest in Christen- 
dom, an extra-special interest in our own 
Church or sect, and a minor interest, chiefly 
with a view to the spread of Christianity, to 
Humanity at large. We assume, instinctively 
and half -unconsciously, that God's outlook on 
the Universe is, at its widest, as geocentric as 
our own. We shall therefore do well to re- 
mind ourselves from time to time, even if this 
should involve the use of paradoxical ideas 
and phrases, that God takes at least as great 
an interest in Sirius (let us say) as in this 
little planet of ours ; and that if we would prove 
our loyalty to him we must work for the wel- 
fare of his Kingdom in its totality, both for 
its own sake and because the least fragment 
of it finds its final meaning and its final pur- 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 97 

pose in the meaning and the purpose of the 
Infinite Whole. 

What is the ultimate factor in the problem 
of choice? This is indeed a searching ques- 
tion. Yet an answer of some sort must be given 
to it. How does the matter stand? We seem 
to be given our choice between allying our- 
selves with the supreme and central Will and 
resisting it. The supreme and central Will is 
ever making for life — for the evolution, the 
expansion, the elevation, the enrichment of life. 
Therefore, in allying ourselves with it, we are 
walking in the path of life; in resisting it, we 
are walking in the path of death. If we are 
asked why we are to live for the Universe 
rather than for self, let us give this as our 
reason. It may be, nay, it must be, an inade- 
quate reason; but behind it we cannot go. 
When we have got to the instinct which makes 
us choose life rather than death — an instinct 
which admits of endless expansion and trans- 
formation — we have got down to the bedrock 
of human nature. 



THE AKCH-ENEMY 

THE arch-enemy of man and God is self. 
To live for the Universe is to live in the 
infinite. To live for self is to rest, or try to 
rest, in the finite. When I oppose self to the 
Universe, I am thinking, not of the natural 
man, not of the lower self, not of the carnal 
self, not of the individual self; I am thinking 
of whatever self- — be it high or low, wide or 
narrow, spiritual or carnal, communal or in- 
dividual — has succumbed to the lure of finality 
and is seeking to find rest, for good and all, 
in itself. 

The choice between self and the Universe is 
the choice between finality and infinitude. The 
antithesis takes a thousand forms, and we can 
never exhaust its possibilities. The animal 
self, the worldly self, the pleasure-loving self, 
the pettily egoistic self, the rapacious self, the 

98 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 99 

aggressive self, the individualistic self, the 
spiritually exalted self — these are familiar em- 
bodiments of the self-seeking tendency which 
wars against the soul. The very efforts that 
we make to master self are too often controlled 
and directed by self. For the soul that rests, 
that comes to a standstill in its pilgrimage, 
however far it may have progressed, is in 
danger of relapsing into self-love. The legalist 
who fulfills all his obligations, the saint who 
counts himself one of the elect, may be further 
from the Kingdom of Heaven than the pub- 
licans and sinners whose garments they would 
not pollute themselves by touching. On the 
other hand, the life of the senses is not neces- 
sarily selfish; nor is the life of pleasure, the 
life of business, the life of the world. So long 
as the soul can use these without abusing them, 
can pass through them and pass beyond them, 
so long as it can keep open its communications 
with the infinite, it is still in the way of salva- 
tion, however far it may be from the goal. 

Even the cult of individuality, far from be- 
ing necessarily selfish, may prove to be the 
very antidote to the individualism with which 



100 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

it is too often confounded. We mean by a 
man's individuality the lines along which his 
soul, if it remains true to itself, is predestined 
to grow. In other words, since growth is self- 
transcendence, we mean by individuality the 
appointed way of escape from self. As such, 
it is to be counted sacred and jealously guarded 
against the tyranny, whether formal or merely 
conventional, which seeks to grind men to one 
pattern, thereby tending to mechanicalize 
morality and lead men to confound the path 
of duty with the path of make-believe, of hy- 
pocrisy and cant. It is when the individual 
accepts his individuality as final and tries to 
affirm his actual self instead of outgrowing it, 
that individuality becomes a narrow and ever- 
narrowing prison instead of an outlet into an 
ampler life. 

Christ's message to mankind was inspired 
by the conviction that to be imprisoned in self 
is death, that to escape from self — to escape 
from it eternally — is eternal life. Hence his 
intense antipathy to the Pharisaic develop- 
ments of legalism, in which the cult of finality 
had become a gospel, and the quenching of 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 101 

idealism a new ideal, while spiritual freedom, 
which keeps one in touch with the infinite by 
opening up to the soul a limitless sphere of 
activity, was suppressed with fanatical zeal. 
Hence the unattainable ideals which he set be- 
fore us, the impossibly high standards which he 
bade us live up to; as, for example, when he 
warned us that to look at a woman with lustful 
eyes was to commit adultery with her in our 
heart; when he said to us "Love your enemies, 
bless them that curse you, do good to them that 
hate you"; when he formulated the command- 
ment, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thy- 
self"; above all, when he said with sublime 
daring, "Be ye perfect, even as your Father 
in Heaven is perfect/ ' Finality in morals — so 
he seems to have argued — is immorality: the 
quest of the infinite alone can stimulate and 
inspire. 

The actual self rebelling against the ideal, the 
actual self idealizing its own limitations — 
this is what we mean by self when we use such 
words as selfish, self-will, self -seeking, self- 
centered, self-absorbed, and oppose the service 
of self to the service of the Universe of God. 



102 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

It is the tendency to take a static rather than 
a dynamic view of things which is responsible 
for much of our wrong thinking. It is the same 
tendency, reappearing in the spheres of prac- 
tical and of inward life, reappearing as the 
love of finality and the dread of the infinite, 
which is responsible for most of our wrong 
doing and wrong living. How is that tendency 
to be counteracted? How is self, the arch- 
enemy of God and man, to be disarmed? How 
is its chronic rebellion to be put down? This 
is the problem which Christ faced and solved. 



XI 

THE MEANING OF SELF-SACRIFICE 

HOW did Christ solve the problem? By 
transforming self through its own death 
and resurrection. By dying to the false self 
that he might live to the true self. Deeper than 
the self-seeking instinct, which makes for final- 
ity and death, lies the ineradicable instinct to 
live. Let the man who is at grips with self 
rouse that instinct to activity and call it to 
his aid, and he will be invincible. Let him place 
it at the service of self ; and self, vitalized into 
newness of life, transfigured beyond recogni- 
tion, will cease to be self — and his victory over 
it will be won. 

The self-seeking instinct and the instinct to 
live are contrary the one to the other. The 
former makes for quiescence, for the slowing 
down of movement till a process becomes a 
state. The latter makes for continuous en- 
ergizing and therefore for continuous self- 

103 



104 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

transcendence. The former aims at the impos- 
sible. The latter allies itself with the central 
tendency of nature. A process can become a 
counter-process. It cannot, except temporarily 
and provisionally, become a state. The dream 
of entering into a state and abiding in it for- 
ever is of all dreams the most delusive. There 
is no standing still in nature. All is flux, 
movement, change. You can go forward, or 
you can backward. You can develop, or you 
can degenerate. You can increase, or you can 
decrease. You can ascend into the infinite, or 
you can descend into the infinitesimal. But you 
cannot permanently stay where you are. 
Therefore, in living for self, in accepting the 
actual self as ideal and final, you are render- 
ing the greatest possible disservice to self — 
you are working for its extinction. For if you 
will not labor to expand self, you will have to 
labor, unknown to yourself, in spite of your- 
self, to contract it. With each act of self-in- 
dulgence, with each feeling of self-satisfaction, 
self shrinks a little; 1 and to this process of 

1 After the manner of the "Magic Skin" in Balzac's well- 
known story. 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 105 

shrinking there is no limit. The end of it, if 
it is not arrested, is extinction, perdition, 
eternal death. This is the goal for which the 
self-seeking instinct is always making. The 
instinct to live looks in the opposite direction. 
Its path is self -transcendence. Its goal is in- 
finite self -transcendence, other names for which 
are salvation, eternal life. 

Hence the great paradox : If yon live to self 
— the actual self — you will die. If you die to the 
actual self, you will live. It was on this para- 
dox that Christ took his stand, embodying it in 
his life, symbolizing it in his death, making 
it the pivot of all his teaching. "If any man 
will come after me let him deny himself and 
take up his cross and follow me. For whoso- 
ever will save his life shall lose it; and who- 
soever will lose his life for my sake 2 shall find 

2 Did Christ really say "for my sake"? In St. Luke's 
version the words are omitted. They are certainly in keeping 
with the two Messianic texts which follow those I have quoted. 
But are those texts genuine? If they are, if Christ really 
said "There be some standing here, which shall not taste of 
death, till they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom," 
he was the victim of a strange delusion; and in that case 
one can only say that the greatest of men have their hours 
and their moods of weakness. In any case the words "for 
my sake" must be interpreted in the light of another of 



106 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

it. For what is a man profited if he shall gain 
the whole world and lose his own soul?" If 
the actual self becomes, as it is ever tending 
to do, aggressive and self-assertive, if it says 
to you "Accept me, live for me, find rest in 
me," you are not to parley with it for a mo- 
ment. Half measures are worse than useless. 
You must turn your back on it, get away from 
it, forget it. If it will not let you do this, if 
it is insistent in its claims upon you, you must 
take stronger measures. You must renounce 
it, die to it, crucify it. You must "take the 
snake of self in a steady grasp" and strangle 
it. You must choose between its death and 
your own. 

This is the real meaning of self-sacrifice, a 
meaning which has often been obscured or even 
lost sight of owing to the ascendency of the 
dualistic doctrine of Original Sin. We are apt 
to think of self -denial — by which I mean the 
systematic practice of self-sacrifice — as the 
cutting away of what is intrinsically evil. But, 
on the contrary, it is the pushing away of dead 

Christ's sayings: " Forasmuch as ye did it unto the least of 
one of these little ones, ye did it unto me." 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 107 

wood and dead foliage through the outgrowth 
of what is intrinsically good. The conception 
of self-sacrifice which has found expression in 
a Puritanical narrowing of life is radically un- 
sound. The function of self-sacrifice is to 
prepare the way for the expansion of life. 
Nay, it is itself the product of such expansion, 
the resistless uprush of the sap of life being 
the very force which makes the dead wood fall 
away. It is out of the excess of his spiritual 
vitality, of his latent idealism, that a man is 
able to die to his actual self. 

But it is not only through our distrust of 
human nature that we have failed to fathom 
the deeper meaning of self-sacrifice. It is 
also, and more especially, through our miscon- 
ception of the reward which Christ promised 
to those who were willing to die to self. "He 
that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that 
hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto 
life eternal.' ' The popular conception of 
Heaven as a state of salvation has led us to 
think of "life eternal" as the continuance of 
that state for ever and ever. Nothing could 
be further from the spirit of Christ's teaching. 



108 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

"A state of salvation" is a contradiction in 
terms. Static equilibrium is death. If a state 
is to endure it must become a process. Growth 
is of the essence of life. Eternal life must 
therefore find its counterpart in eternal growth, 
in eternal self-transcendence. We must die, 
says Christ, if we would live. Let us give the 
word live in this saying the stress that it de- 
mands. We must kill out the desire for final- 
ity if we would live to the infinite, if we would 
enter into eternal life. The true reward of 
self-sacrifice is the expansion of life which it 
makes possible. To think otherwise, to prac- 
tice self-sacrifice for the sake of a reward which 
is to be given after death, and enjoyed as given 
to all eternity, is to misinterpret Christ's 
message to mankind, to invert its meaning and 
make it a gospel of despair and death. 

The secret of the cross is an open secret. 
The philosophy of the gospel of self-sacrifice 
is as simple as it is profound. The essence 
of growth, and therefore of life, is the con- 
tinuous transcendence of the actual through 
the self-evolution of an inward ideal. This is 
the supreme law of spiritual as well as of 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 109 

physical life. The surrender of the actual to 
the ideal is always the outcome of self-sacrifice. 
When the surrender is consciously and volun- 
tarily made, we have the self-sacrifice which 
is the basic principle of morality. "When the 
surrender is made for the sake of the ideal, and 
of it only, we have the self-sacrifice which 
Christ preached and practiced; we have the 
death on the cross which is a birth into a larger 
life. 



XII 

GUIDANCE FEOM WITHIN 

THE supreme end of life, as Christ con- 
ceived it, is to live for God and for 
God's kingdom, the Universe. The arch-enemy 
of God and of God's kingdom is self — the 
actual self claiming to be ideal and so demand- 
ing the whole of our devotion and service. If 
this enemy is to be disarmed, life must be based 
on self-sacrifice. How is this to be done? By 
man throwing his will-power on the side of the 
ideal self. But how is he to distinguish the 
ideal self from the actual when their respective 
interests conflict? 

This question is not easy to answer. Christ 
has set us a heavy task. To live for the Uni- 
verse is to live in the infinite, and to live in 
the infinite is to enter into life eternal. The 
Universe, the infinite, the eternal — when we use 
such words as these we imply that we are com- 

110 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 111 

mitting ourselves to an immense adventure, 
that we are pursuing a pathless path to an 
ever-receding goal. In that adventure we shall 
need guidance if we are not to go far astray. 
"Where shall we find it? 

In the answer that he gave to this question 
Christ was as grandly original as in the rest of 
his teaching. Hitherto men had trusted for 
guidance to direction from without, to codified 
law, or to recognized custom. Christ bade them 
turn for guidance to the light that lighted them 
from within. In thinking of God as the all- 
loving Father, he brought man into line with 
the rest of living things. These things have 
their own lives to live, their own adventures 
to pursue. Who or what guides them — guides 
them in the ordering of their lives, in their 
search for food, in the propagation of their 
kind, in the preparation and care for their 
young, in their periodical migrations, and the 
like? Nature. They follow their own in- 
stincts. Guidance comes to them from within. 
There is a light in each of them which falls on 
the path of life. Is it not the same with man? 
The real, the central tendencies of his nature 



112 THE SECRET OP THE CROSS 

— are not these his appointed guides? He asks 
how he is to know the ideal self from the actual, 
the true self from the false. Does not the ideal 
itself discredit the actual? Does not the true 
self announce itself as being higher and more 
real than the false? 

In birds, beasts, and fishes the guiding 
principle is called instinct. We may, if we 
please, give the same name to the guiding 
principle in man. But when we come to the 
higher levels of man's nature, another name 
seems to be needed. For the word "instinct" 
carries with it a suggestion of blindness and 
inevitableness, due to the preponderance of in- 
herited tendency, which is scarcely in keeping 
with our experience of the working of the 
guiding principle in the soul of man. Instinct 
in the lower animals is largely inherited; and, 
though it admits of being duly trained, it does 
not admit, or only in a minor degree, of de- 
velopment beyond the limits prescribed by 
heredity. Man, on the other hand, seems to 
bring with him into the world a general capac- 
ity for evolving senses and sub-senses— 
faculties of direct perception — in response to 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 113 

the pressure of his complex and ever-changing 
environment. Such senses are social tact, 
political sagacity, literary and artistic tastes, 
conscience, intuitive judgment, and the like. 
These are familiar examples of the working of 
that power of discerning the bearing of things, 
of "getting the hang of things,' 9 in whatever 
sphere of activity he may be placed, with which 
man, alone among living things, is endowed. 
On the higher and more spiritual levels of 
man's being the fittest name for this guiding 
principle is intuition. 

Legalism, by overwhelming man with guid- 
ance from without, with positive direction, with 
rules and sub-rules, did its best to destroy his 
moral and spiritual intuition; and in that de- 
velopment of itself which is known as Phari- 
saism it came very near to achieving its pur- 
pose. For, as the intuition weakened, the 
demand for authoritative guidance increased; 
and the more the letter of the law was deferred 
to, the more tyrannous and exacting it became, 
and the greater was the multiplication of rules 
and sub-rules, of casuistical interpretations, of 
hair-splitting distinctions, till at last the sense 



114 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

of duty became a disease, and conscientious- 
ness a groping descent into the trivial, the 
sordid, and the infinitesimal. 

Christ had many reasons for his quarrel with 
Pharisaism. Its materialism, its externalism, 
its literalism were at opposite poles to his 
conception of life. The hypocrisy, the cant, 
the evasiveness in morals, the bargaining with 
God, the lying to one's own conscience which 
it encouraged, revolted him. But he hated it 
most because, by deadening intuition, it blinded 
the very eye of the soul. And the first and 
last proof of that blindness was that the sense 
of obligation to the dead letter of a dead Law 
took the place of the sense of obligation to the 
will of God and the service of one's fellow 
men. "If the light that is in thee be darkness, 
how great is that darkness ! ' ' 

What remedy did Christ find for this malady? 
He did not tell his hearers in so many words 
that legalism had deadened their intuition and 
that the rule of right and wrong (if they only 
knew it) was in themselves. Had he done so, 
his words, if they had not missed fire, might 
have shocked and startled them and imperiled 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 115 

their mental and moral balance. So he did 
what was less dangerous and more effective. 
He brought the truth home to them, indirectly 
and in many ways. His own language was 
poetical, the language of emotional insight. In 
using it he addressed himself to the emotional 
insight of his hearers, and roused this into 
activity by postulating its existence. He made 
no appeal to authority or precedent except for 
purely controversial purposes. When he him- 
self taught with authority he appealed to the 
general heart of man. However idealistic 
might be his precepts, however paradoxical 
they might seem to men whose conscience had 
been sophisticated by centuries of legalism, he 
took for granted that there were chords in 
human nature which could vibrate in response 
to them. In indicating the path of conduct he 
took for granted that it was a path which men, 
if their eyes were opened, could see for them- 
selves. "Open your eyes," he said to them, 
"and you will see. Seek and ye shall find. 
Ask and ye shall receive. The desire, the 
effort must come from within yourselves. The 
all-loving Father bears witness to himself in 



116 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

the heart of every living thing. The lamp of 
life which he has kindled in you is a lantern 
whose light will guide you on your adventure 
if you will but use it- 7 

Christ's one desire was to make men realize 
the presence of God in nature and in them- 
selves. If God was their Father, they must 
be of high lineage and their possibilities must 
be divine. Among those possibilities was the 
power of getting into touch with reality, of 
recognizing truth, of knowing right from 
wrong. If they believed in God, they must 
needs believe in themselves; and if they be- 
lieved in themselves, they must needs walk by 
the light which the God within them cast on 
their path. The light might be dim and un- 
steady ; but if they followed it loyally, it would 
gradually become clear and strong. For 
spiritual intuition, like every other faculty, 
grows by being exercised; and "if any man will 
do God's will he shall know the doctrine 
whether it be of God." 

With the re-kindling of the inward light, 
the inward ideal and the inward standard 
would take the place of the outward. This 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 117 

change would have far-reaching consequences. 
When right and wrong are measured by out- 
ward standards, regard for public opinion be- 
comes one of the strongest of all motives. The 
legalist is bound to be a hypocrite (in the strict 
sense of the word), an actor, one who plays 
a part. The eyes of his fellow legalists are 
upon him, and all his slips are noted and con- 
demned. No tyranny is so demoralizing as 
that of an inquisitorial public opinion; for the 
onlooker, who cannot know the motives which 
are really at work, is almost inevitably an 
unjust judge; and the more he is deferred to, 
the more does obedience to the letter of the 
law tend to take the place of obedience to the 
spirit, to conscience, to the inward voice. For 
Christ the spirit is everything in morality. The 
standard of worth is wholly inward and in- 
trinsic. What each man is in the sight of God 
— i.e., in his own complex inwardness — that he 
is and no more. What each act is in the sight 
of God, that it is and no more. The Pharisee 
did his good works in public. His praise was 
of men. The follower of Christ was to give 
alms in secret, to fast in secret, to pray in 



118 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

secret. And he who does good in secret is in 
touch with intrinsic reality and has begun to 
find strength and guidance in himself. 

There are two cardinal Christian doctrines 
in which the presence of a guiding principle in 
the heart and soul of man is plainly set forth 
— two doctrines which are really one — the doc- 
trine of the Incarnation and the doctrine of the 
Holy Spirit. Theology has formulated both 
doctrines in the notation of the supernatural, 
and has therefore de-naturalized them, de- 
humanized them, de-spiritualized them. But 
their essential truth survives this misinterpre- 
tation of them. For both doctrines proclaim 
the potential oneness of man with God. In 
virtue of that potential oneness, the higher 
nature of man announces itself as higher, truth 
announces itself as truth, right as right, light 
as light. Cases of doubt and perplexity will 
arise from time to time, and guidance from 
without will often be helpful. The pressure 
on the individual of the tradition into which 
he is born has a might which is three parts 
right. Yet even that tribunal, authoritative 
though it be, is only a Court of First Instance. 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 119 

The heart of man is its own Supreme Court 
of Appeal. "When he the Spirit of truth is 
come he will guide you into all truth.' J The 
Spirit of truth, the Holy Spirit, has been with 
us from the beginning of things. He will 
"come" to us when we learn to recognize his 
presence. 



xm 

THE ANTIDOTE TO SEPAEATISM 

THE God who takes sides is an active 
principle of strife. "Wherever he is wor- 
shipped, dogmatism and separatism follow in 
his train. No gulf of separation is so deep as 
that between the believer and the unbeliever, 
between the champion and the enemy of God. 
Men are quarrelsome enough, as it is. Their 
angry passions are easily aroused. Their 
material interests conflict. They fight for 
precedence, for position, for power. They com- 
pete against one another for the various "good 
things of life. ' ' But as a rule their anger is 
short-lived. A malignant temper is compara- 
tively rare. Sooner or later, except where 
blood-feuds prevail, the disputants settle their 
quarrels and become friends again. But 
supernaturalism both intensifies and perpetu- 
ates our angry passions by tempting us to 

120 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 121 

consecrate them to the service of God. In 
doing this it raises anger to the level of hatred 
and introduces a spiritual blood-feud into 
man's life. 

And this is not all. There is a deadlier 
separatism than that of the vendetta. One can 
respect an enemy even when one hates him. 
But one cannot respect a moral and spiritual 
leper. One cannot respect the man from whose 
touch one shrinks as from the contagion of the 
plague. And this is what the dogmatist, be he 
Jew, Christian, Mussulman, or Brahmin, in- 
stinctively does. He holds himself aloof from 
the bulk of his fellow-men and counts his isola- 
tion as holiness. The knowledge that he is one 
of the elect, that the truth of God is in his 
keeping, that he is the chosen instrument of 
God's will, has infected him with the deadliest 
of all poisons, with the aloofness of self -right- 
eousness and spiritual pride. 

Wherever supernaturalism is in the ascend- 
ant, that poison is at work. The separatist 
spirit does more than sever creed from creed. 
Within the limits of each creed its disin- 
tegrative influence makes itself felt. The more 



122 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

dogmatic and intolerant the creed, the more 
certain it is to break up into a multitude of 
sects and Churches, each of which regards it- 
self as the only orthodox interpreter of the 
parent creed, and is therefore ready, when 
controversy arises, to anathematize and excom- 
municate the rest. Nor does the disintegrative 
action of supernaturalism end there. Even in 
the smallest of sects the leaven of separatism 
is at work. The pious pride themselves on 
their piety, shun the company of the careless 
and indifferent, and claim that in so doing they 
are keeping themselves unspotted from the 
world. 

Belonging as he did by birth and upbringing 
to the most intolerant of all creeds — the creed 
which had seated its own national deity on the 
throne of the Universe, and which may there- 
fore be regarded as the fountain-head of re- 
ligious dogmatism — Christ broke completely 
with the tradition into which he was born. Be- 
tween him and the Pharisees, who, as their 
name indicates, were the avowed exponents of 
separatism in conduct, there was a truceless 
war. The God whom he worshiped was the 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 123 

Father of all men, the sustainer and protector 
of all existent things. In the strength of this 
conception he resolved all religion and moral- 
ity into two great commandments; and the 
second of these was "Thou shalt love thy 
neighbor as thy self.' ' But who is my neigh- 
bor? For the Jew, his neighbor was (at best) 
his fellow-Jew. For the Pharisee, his neigh- 
bor was his fellow-Pharisee. For the elect, of 
whatever creed, his neighbor is his fellow- 
saint. In the parable of the Good Samaritan 
Christ answered this question. The Samaritan, 
between whose people and the Jews there was 
a deadly feud of long standing, finding one of 
his enemies in distress, succored and tended 
him as if he were his dearest friend. If your 
hereditary enemy is your neighbor, it surely 
follows a fortiori that your neighbor is your 
fellow man. And you are to love your neigh- 
bor as yourself. 

If the poison of separatism is to be expelled 
from the heart of man, an antidote must be 
found to the dogmatism of which its presence 
is a symptom. Such an antidote Christ found 
in the higher agnosticism, for which his re- 



124 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

habilitation of intuition, his release of it from 
the paralyzing pressure of creed and code, pre- 
pared the way. No word is so often misused 
as agnosticism. Of those who call themselves 
agnostics three-fourths are either negative 
dogmatists, or indifferentists who incline to- 
wards the "Everlasting No." Of the remain- 
ing fourth a majority are indifferentists who 
incline towards the "Everlasting Yea." The 
higher agnosticism, the agnosticism of him 
whose faith is so secure that it is content to 
remain unformulated, is comparatively rare. 

But such an agnosticism and such a faith 
were Christ's. His trust in the goodness of 
God and the right ordering of the Universe 
was so overwhelmingly strong that it might 
well have defied expression and bound him to 
a sacred silence. If it did not do so, the reason 
is that he was a poet at heart, and that poetry 
is the language of inspiration, the language 
which true and deep emotion finds for itself. 
Leaving it to others to define the undefinable, 
to formulate the unf ormulable, to cater in these 
and other ways for man's ignoble craving for 
mental satisfaction, Christ was content to 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 125 

speak in parables, in paradoxes, in pregnant 
aphorisms — content to nse whatever words 
might come to him of their own accord when 
joy, the joy which is the other self of faith, 
set his heart a-singing. Hence the magic of 
his appeal to men. The virtue of poetry, as 
the instrument of deep feeling and high think- 
ing, lies in this, that it says many things to 
many men and so leaves each man free to in- 
terpret its message for himself. The message 
which is so delivered becomes a living influence 
in one's life. And, being a living principle in 
every life, it becomes a bond of union in- 
stead of a .source of discord. If truth could 
be imprisoned in a formula, the rivalry of 
competing formulas would set creed against 
creed, people against people, man against 
man. But if truth is a living message from 
the heart of God to the heart of man, a message 
which each man is to receive and interpret for 
himself, then, though no man may boast of 
possessing truth, every man may be in touch 
with it. In that case "live and let live" would 
become our motto in the highest sphere of 
human activity, and mutual tolerance would 



126 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

prepare the way for the reign of sympathy and 
love. 

Then, and not till then, would Christ's appeal 
to men to love and live for God, and to love 
and live for one another, become effective. So 
long as it is possible for men to think that 
intolerance, aloofness, anger, hatred, cruelty 
and other evil passions are acceptable to God, 
that appeal will fall on deaf ears, and the 
selfishness which is the reflexion of man's mate- 
rialistic outlook on life will continue to sway 
the world. For nothing does so much to per- 
petuate the sway of selfishness as the constant 
reinforcement of it from what are supposed to 
be the highest and most spiritual levels of ex- 
istence. In spiritualizing our ideals, in preach- 
ing the gospel of self-sacrifice and love, Christ 
brought us in sight of what he called the 
"Kingdom of God." In providing an antidote 
to religious dogmatism and to the odious in- 
tractable type of separatism which it generates, 
he swept away, ideally and potentially, the most 
formidable of all obstacles to the coming of 
that kingdom. 



XIV 
THE SOUL OF CHRIST'S TEACHING 

LET us now ask ourselves what were the 
salient features of Christ's message. He 
was not a systematic teacher. He gave us no 
code of law, no fully elaborated scheme of life, 
no logically developed theory of things. He 
spoke to us out of the fullness of his heart, in 
the language of poetry, the language of emo- 
tional insight, the language which overflowing 
emotion finds for itself. His teaching, though 
unsystematized, was therefore a whole and a 
living whole. As such it should be received 
and judged and used. The spirit of it is every- 
thing; the letter nothing. Those who hunt 
about in it for " theological information' ' are 
sure to be disappointed. To isolate any one of 
Christ's sayings and make it the basis of an 
argument is to do a grave injustice to it and 
him. 

127 



128 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

And as he spoke to us from his heart, so it 
was to the heart that he addressed himself. He 
made no appeal to our self-interest. He drove 
no bargain with us. He assumed that there 
was something in each of us which would re- 
spond to his message if it could but awake and 
energize. To arouse that better self from its 
slumber, to vivify it, to stimulate it, to inspire 
it, was his main purpose in life. 

The God whom he revealed to us is universal, 
in the fullest sense of the word. He is the God 
of the Universe, not of any one fragment of 
it, not of any one nation, not even of any one 
world. He both constitutes and symbolizes the 
unity of the Universe. In virtue of his indwell- 
ing presence the Universe is a living whole. He 
has no favorites. He is no respecter of per- 
sons or of peoples. He is the All-Father, who 
loves and cares for all men and all things. 

What he is to us we must try to be to him. 
If he is our Father we are his children, and 
we should bear ourselves accordingly. He 
gives us love and service in unstinted measure. 
We should try to do the same to him. His life 
is all giving. We, too, should give freely. We 



THE SECRET OP THE CROSS 129 

are not to play the courtier to him. We are not 
to ask him for privileges, for special favors, 
for things that we covet or think we need. He 
knows our real needs better than we do. We 
can safely leave ourselves in his hands. We 
must, therefore, prove our loyalty to him by 
patriotism, by living for his kingdom and his 
people, by loving and serving our fellow-men. 

The great enemy of God and man is self, the 
actual self claiming to be ideal and final, and 
therefore demanding the whole of our devotion 
and service. Our choice lies in the last resort 
between living for self (in this sense of the 
word) and living for the Universe, which is the 
same thing as living for God. If we live for 
self, our life will contract steadily; and the 
end of that process will be extinction, death. 
If we live for the Universe, our life will expand 
steadily; and as it expands we shall realize 
God's presence in our hearts, and in doing this 
we shall enter into eternal life. 

But there is to be no profit or loss calcula- 
tion in our response to God's love and care. 
We are to ask for no prize of victory, for no 
reward of service. We are to give, freely, 



130 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

lavishly, uncalculatingly, to give because God 
gives and because we are his children. Yet a 
reward will be given to us if we do not ask for 
one. Giving is living; for the inrush of life 
will always balance, and more than balance, the 
outrush. And living — the expanding and deep- 
ening of life — is its own reward. 

This, as it seems to me, is the sum and sub- 
stance of Christ's message to mankind. 

Let us now go back to the " rankers" whose 
attitude towards religion has been defined for 
us by the Student-in-Arms. We have seen 
that the current presentment of Christianity 
had revolted them, that the supernaturalism 
and separatism which seemed to be of its es- 
sence had turned them against religion. This, 
as our author says, was a veritable tragedy. 
But the tragedy, things being as they are, was 
inevitable. In their rejection of the miracu- 
lous, in their dislike of Pharisaical aloofness, 
they were guided by a wise instinct. What was 
tragic was their assumption that those were 
vital features of the Christianity of Christ. 
For this, however, their teachers are to be 
blamed, not they. If Christ's message ~ould 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 131 

have been presented to them in its sublime sim- 
plicity, if they could have realized that it was 
in its essence a demand for disinterested de- 
votion, for self-sacrifice and love, that it was 
an appeal to them to give to God and God's 
kingdom what they were already giving to their 
king and their country, would not some chords 
in their hearts have vibrated in response to it? 
They were already Christians, without know- 
ing it. "They believed absolutely' ' — so the 
Student-in-Arms assures us — "in the Chris- 
tian virtues of unselfishness, generosity, char- 
ity, and humility." If they could have realized 
that those were the cardinal virtues of Chris- 
tianity, that in practicing them they were 
serving God and following Christ, and there- 
fore getting hold of what was real and vital in 
religion, would they not have gladly accepted 
Christ as their leader and been ready to follow 
him whithersoever he might lead them? 



XV 
DEAD WOOD 

WHAT can we do to clarify and simplify 
Christianity? We must begin by dis- 
entangling it from Judaism. The God whom 
Christendom worships is a hybrid deity, a cross 
between the God of the Old Testament and the 
God of the New. The God of the Old Testa- 
ment is also a hybrid deity, a cross between 
the Lord of the Universe and the national God 
of Israel. Therefore the God of Christendom 
is triune, in a sense other than that which the 
word bears in Christian theology. Three per- 
sonalities meet in him — the God of Israel, the 
Lord of the Universe, and the all-loving Father 
— an anthropomorphic God, a transcendent 
God, and an immanent God. 

On one point we must make our minds quite 
clear. The God of Israel, the "magnified and 
non-natural man" whose doings and sayings 

132 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 133 

are duly chronicled in the Old Testament, is 
not the God of the Universe. The existing con- 
fusion between the God of Christ (who is the* 
true God of the Universe) and the God of 
Israel has been the ruin of bibliolatrous 
Protestantism and a great calamity for the rest 
of Christendom. So fatal a mistake must at 
all costs be corrected. Nor are the Jewish 
Scriptures the authentic word of God. There 
is no authentic word of God. If there has been 
any revelation to man, any message from a 
higher level of Nature, there have been many, 
but not one is supernaturally divine. There 
are many sacred Scriptures. Each of them 
has an element of divine truth in it. Some are 
truer than others. The Upanishads, it may 
fairly be contended, have more spiritual truth 
in them than the Old Testament. But no one 
Scripture can claim to be the Word of God. 
There is a practical moral to this conclusion. 
If we approach the Bible in a critical spirit, 
our attitude towards it must be as disinter- 
ested, as unprejudiced, as impartial as if we 
were dealing with the Koran or the Rig Veda. 
The late Canon Liddon, in the last sermon that 



134 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

he preached, deplored the publication of Lux 
Mundiy which had recently appeared, and 
warned "his audience of the impossibility of 
a criticism with limited liability, once any por- 
tion of the Canonical Scriptures was treated 
like any or every other historical document. m 
His warning was in effect a prophecy which is 
in course of being fulfilled. With the spread 
of the critical spirit, our attitude towards what 
a Professor of Theology has called "the folk 
lore of Israel' J is changing and will continue 
to change. How far the change will carry us 
and what effect it will have on Christian doc- 
trine remains to be seen. It is said that, as 
one result of this change, the doctrine of 
Original Sin, which had already been dis- 
credited by physical science, is as good as dead. 
This is a gross exaggeration. But the doctrine 
is undoubtedly falling into disrepute. When 
it goes, the whole arch of orthodox Christian 
doctrine, of which it happens to be the key- 
stone, will collapse. It was the static concep- 
tion of the Universe, centering in the belief in 

1 ' * Religious Changes in Oxford during the last Fifty Years, ' ' 
by R. W. Macan, D.Litt. 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 135 

a supernatural Creator, which necessitated the 
story of the Fall ; and the story of the Fall led 
to the demand for a supernatural Eedeemer. 
If the story is baseless, the demand has no 
meaning. It is impossible to redeem what has 
never been lost. 

When we have disentangled Christianity 
from Judaism, we shall be the better able to 
disentangle it from supernaturalism in general 
and thaumaturgy in particular. If, and so far 
as, Christ's message is true, it carries with it 
its own credentials. The appeal that it makes 
to the general heart of man is the certificate of 
its origin and the warrant of its authority. If 
our chief reason for accepting Christianity was 
that Christ wrought miracles and thereby 
proved that he had a divine commission, our 
acceptance of it would be to that extent un- 
critical, undiscriminating, and insincere. And 
our hold on it would be highly precarious. For 
if miracles should become discredited, the entire 
structure of our faith would be undermined. 
The Bishop of Oxford is, as we have seen, 
amazed at Dr. Henson's "naive confidence" 
that "the theological ideas of the Church and 



136 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

the New Testament . • . can survive unim- 
paired when the miraculous facts have been 
repudiated.'' If there are theological ideas 
which cannot survive unimpaired when certain 
miraculous facts have been repudiated, the 
sooner we jettison them the better. For, what- 
ever may be their merits or demerits, they are 
not of the essence of Christianity. 

Nor is it only because supernaturalism pro- 
vides a false basis for religious faith, that we 
are to liberate Christianity from its sinister 
influence. It is also, and more especially, be- 
cause the root idea of the supernatural is 
antipathetic to the spirit of Christ's teaching; 
because supernaturalism breaks up the Uni- 
verse into two dissevered worlds, whereas be- 
lief in the organic unity of the Universe is the 
counterpart of belief in the God of love whom 
Christ revealed to us, the All-Father in whom 
we (and all other things) live and move and 
have our being. 

With the passing of the idea of the super- 
natural, an immense incubus will be lifted from 
the mind and heart of man. The idea is ever 
tending to contract our conception of nature — 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 137 

both cosmic and human — and so leads to mate- 
rialism in thought and practice. "Natural- 
ism," as it is miscalled, accepts the distinction 
between nature and the supernatural, and 
agrees with supernaturalism in identifying 
nature with the material world. Eeason, pro- 
scribed and outlawed by ecclesiastical author- 
ity, found a safe refuge for itself and an 
appropriate sphere of work in the investiga- 
tion of physical phenomena; and the fruits of 
its labors have been the various physical 
sciences. The scientific mind, influenced by a 
quasi-professional prejudice in favor of its 
own subject-matter and its own methods, has 
been tempted to assume that positive knowl- 
edge is the only knowledge, and that what 
cannot be known (as physical science under- 
stands the word) does not exist. In the 
strength of this assumption it has denied the 
supernatural; and as it endorses the popular 
identification of nature with the material 
world, its rejection of the supernatural has led 
it to conclude that the material world is the 
"all of being" and that the spiritual aspect of 
the Universe is unreal. 



138 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

As is the contraction of cosmic nature, so 
is the contraction of human nature. The 
"naturalism" which denies the reality of the 
spiritual world allies itself with the super- 
naturalism which regards human nature as 
intrinsically evil. The result of their joint 
action is an immense underestimate of man's 
natural capacity, mental, moral, and — above 
all — spiritual. There is reason to believe that 
vast reserves of spiritual vitality are waiting 
in each of us to be realized. But so long as 
man, paralyzed by self-distrust and ignorant 
of his own possibilities, is unable to call these 
into activity, they will remain inactive and 
therefore, for all practical purposes, non- 
existent : 

"for if our virtues 
Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike 
As if we had them not. " 

And this underestimate of human nature does 
more than hinder development. It also per- 
verts it. Self-distrust sends man, when he feels 
the need of ethical guidance, to external 
authority. This leads to externalism in morals 
— to the despotism of code and creed and 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 139 

Church; to the ascendency of casuistry over 
conscience; to the subordination of the spirit 
to the letter, of cleanness of heart — purity of 
motive — to correctness of outward action. It 
leads further than this. It leads at last to tha 
pursuit of outward ends for their own sakes; 
to the externalizing and therefore the mate- 
rializing of our ideals and standards; to a 
materialistic outlook on life, with all that this 
implies — to individualism, to egoism, to general 
demoralization. Cut off from its true source 
in the inward life of man, cut off from the sap 
which alone can feed and sustain it, morality 
withers on its stem. What s^lf-distrust had 
done to Israel, Christ has made plain to us. 
And what it did to Israel, it does in greater 
or less degree wherever its leaven is at work. 
If man is to live aright, he must find strength 
and guidance in himself ; he must trust his own 
nature, with its unexplored depths, its infinite 
possibilities, its inexhaustible capacity for 
good. He must trust it and use it; and the 
more fully he uses it, the more worthy will it 
show itself of his trust. But if he is to do this, 



140 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

the shadow of the supernatural must cease to 
chill and darken his life. 

The passing of supernaturalism will be fol- 
lowed by the passing of dogmatism. It is in 
the name of the supernatural God that man 
says "What seems to me is." The basic as- 
sumption of dogmatism is that divine truth, 
having been delivered to man from a super- 
natural source, admits of being set forth in 
propositions which, like mathematical or chem- 
ical formulas, are intrinsically true — proposi- 
tions which may mean different things to 
different minds and may even be meaningless 
for many minds, but which, being intrinsically 
true, must be accepted and subscribed to by 
all who wish to be saved. This assumption is, 
as we have seen, a fruitful source of separatism 
and strife, of hatred, malice and all unchar- 
itableness. No other assumption has done so 
much to set men at variance with one another, 
to produce disunion, disorder, disharmony in 
their social life, to retard the advent of the 
reign of love. 

The action of dogmatism in the mental sphere 
is as disastrous as in the moral and social. It 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 141 

is through the co-operation of reason and in^ 
tuition that man works his way towards ideal 
truth. Eeligious dogmatism divorces reason 
from intuition, through its proscription of the 
former as individualistic and rebellious, and its 
supersession of the latter by credulity posing 
as faith; for, by thus paralyzing their re- 
spective activities in the sphere of high think- 
ing, the sphere in which co-operation between 
them is essential and in which they naturally 
tend to co-operate, it estranges them from one 
another and sows dissension between them and 
mutual distrust. 

The antidote to dogmatism has already been 
indicated. The poetic temperament, which is 
agnostic, in the deeper and truer sense of the 
word, is antipathetic to the dogmatic. When 
our light is as darkness, the poet, though he 
feels more strongly and sees deeper than the 
rest of us, is content to say "I feel so and so. 
I see such and such. This or that seems to 
me," without going on to say, "What seems to 
me is." If, then, we wish to avoid the dog- 
matic attitude, with all its sinister conse- 
quences, we must try to think poetically about 



142 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

great matters, we must hold our theories in 
solution and take care that they do not crystal- 
lize into dogmas, we must keep our faith fluid, 
mobile, dynamic. In fine, we must trust for 
guidance, in the sphere of belief, as of conduct, 
to the inward light, to spiritual intuition work- 
ing in harmony with reason, to the inspiration 
of the Holy Spirit, who is for each of us the 
soul of his soul and the life of his life. This 
is what Christ did, and we must try to follow 
in his footsteps. 

When the life of man has ceased to be over- 
shadowed by the supernatural, when his ac- 
tivities have ceased to be paralyzed by the 
distrust of his own nature which has so long 
been authoritatively inculcated, he will be free 
to respond to Christ's call to him — the call to 
give himself lavishly and uncalculatingly to the 
service of God and man, and to find his true 
life in doing so. 



XVI 

THESE LITTLE ONES 

DISINTERESTED devotion is the life and 
soul of religion. Where it is wanting, 
the accessories of religion count for nothing. 
Where it is present, the accessories of religion 
may be wanting, but religion itself is there. 
To give disinterested devotion is the first and 
last lesson that the Christian has to learn. The 
earlier he begins to learn it, the better and the 
happier his adult life will be. 

But how is the lesson to be learnt, and who 
is to teach it? The greatest of all educational 
tragedies is that of the religious training of 
the young. The headmaster of a public ele- 
mentary school was recently dismissed by his 
managers because his school received an un- 
favorable report from a diocesan inspector. 
He brought an action to restrain his managers 
from dismissing him ; and in the course of the 

143 



144 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

trial it came out that his pupils — children be- 
tween the ages of ten and thirteen — were ex- 
pected to answer the following among other 
questions: " Write shortly what you know of 
Abana, Babshakeh, Darius, Shushan, Caiaphas, 
Arimathea, Demetrius and Euroelydon" and 
"On what day are proper prefaces appointed 
to be said? What is said or sung immediately 
after such prefaces?" That questions of this 
type should be seriously propounded to young 
children as a test of religious knowledge makes 
one despair of the future of official Chris- 
tianity. The lack of elementary common sense, 
not to speak of spiritual insight, which they 
reveal is disquieting. Nothing is easier than 
to prepare children, by assiduous cramming, 
for such an ordeal. And nothing is more futile. 
It is possible, as I know from experience, for 
a school to pass the diocesan inspector's yearly 
examination with flying colors, to give correct 
answers to the inspector's questions on Scrip- 
ture history and ecclesiastical procedure, to 
sing hymns and repeat texts and collects to 
his complete satisfaction, to receive a glowing 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 145 

report and be classed as " Excellent' ' — and yet 
to be entirely destitute of religions knowledge. 

For what is religions knowledge but knowl- 
edge of God? And what is knowledge of God 
but the realization of God's presence in the 
heart and soul? In this, the true sense of the 
word, religious knowledge exists as a possi- 
bility in each of us. To actualize that possi- 
bility, to wake the religious instinct from its 
slumber, to vivify it, to stimulate it into in- 
cipient activity, is the appointed work of those 
who are responsible for the religious training 
of the young. 

How is that work to be accomplished? To 
know God is to love him, and to love God is to 
love his children — one's fellow-men. It follows 
that disinterested devotion, unselfish love, is 
the germ of religion. To foster the growth of 
that germ, to give it fair play, to set it free to 
energize, to make the conditions of the child's 
life favorable to its development, is the chief 
duty of the teacher. Let him talk to the child 
about God if he will; but in doing so let him 
follow Christ's example as best he may; let 
his language be simple, emotional, poetical. 



146 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

Let him not profane the greatest of all mys- 
teries by pretending to explain it. Above all, 
let him beware of awaking a quasi-scientific 
curiosity which will probably be skeptical and 
which may have in it an element of secret 
mockery. And if he is plied with questions 
of the ingenious type which children are fond 
of propounding, let him not be ashamed to an- 
swer: "I do not know. No one knows.' ' 

The child will have to become acquainted 
with the Bible. Let us be frank with him, and 
tell him that many of the Old Testament stories 
are really the "folk-lore" of the Jewish people, 
and, far from being the authentic records of 
God's dealing with that people, are not even 
historically true. To allow the child to grow 
up in the belief that the quasi-historical per- 
sonage whom the Jews call Jehovah, and whose 
character they painted in gloomy colors, was 
and is the one and only God, the Creator 
and Euler of the Universe, is to sterilize the 
child's religious instinct by confusing his sense 
of right and wrong, by debasing his standard 
of moral and spiritual worth, by quenching the 
latent idealism of his heart. And to teach him, 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 147 

in the sacred name of religious instruction, 
things which many of us, perhaps most of us, 
no longer regard as true, is a sin against truth, 
the guilt of which is ours, but the penalty of 
which the child will have to pay. And what 
aggravates our guilt and makes the penalty 
the heavier is the fact that, with the spread 
of the critical spirit, our hypocrisy becomes 
more and more transparent, the result being 
that the child, who is quick to see through it, 
learns to think lightly and even cynically of 
what we are teaching him to regard as the most 
sacred of all things. 

If a tree is to be judged by its fruits, re- 
ligious instruction, as it has been given through 
all these centuries, must be pronounced a fail- 
ure. For those who have had control of it are 
loud in their complaints that Christendom is 
relapsing into paganism; and the only inference 
to be drawn from this implicit admission of 
failure is that the teaching of Christianity has 
been fundamentally wrong. If the comrades of 
the Student-at-Arms, men who both admired 
and practiced the Christian virtues, held aloof 
from what they believed to be religion, must 



148 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

we not conclude that in the days of their youth 
they had been the victims of misguided teach- 
ing, that the presentment of religion to them 
had been gravely at fault? 

The claim of official Christianity that the 
religious information which it imparts is 
divinely true is perhaps the ultimate cause of 
its failure. For what is divinely true is true 
for all time; and if the information which 
Christianity imparts is indeed what it is 
claimed to be, it is but right that the form in 
which it is imparted should never change. 
This means that, in the act of propagating itself 
by definite dogmatic teaching, Christianity 
must needs stereotype itself and arrest its own 
development. To say that men are to be taught 
to-day what they were taught 1500 years ago 
is to pay a poor compliment to Christianity. 
Has man stood still during all those centuries? 
If Christianity has not worked for the expan- 
sion of his spirit, what work has it done? And 
if it has worked for the expansion of his spirit, 
why should it try to imprison him to-day in 
the forms of thought; the habits of mind, the 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 149 

theories of things which may have fitted him 
when it first took him in hand, but which, if 
its own teaching has been effective, he ought 
long since to have outgrown? The life of re- 
ligion is continuous self-transcendence. The 
spirit of its teaching is, or ought to be, "the 
One" that "remains." Its formulas are, or 
ought to be, "the Many" that "change and 
pass." The religion which is content with its 
own formulas and wishes to transmit them 
unaltered from generation to generation is dy- 
ing, if not dead. For "in no respect to grow 
is to cease to live." 

The plain truth is that the dream of making 
people religious by imparting "religious knowl- 
edge" to them in their childhood is as mis- 
chievous as it is delusive. To scatter creeds 
and texts and hymns and Bible stories on the 
surface of the child's mind is worse than a 
waste of time. Keligious knowledge is not a 
mass of information which can be imparted as 
one imparts (or used to impart) the multipli- 
cation table or the pence table or the names and 
dates of the Kings of England. It is a prize 



150 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

which each of lis must win for himself. This is 
true, as we are at last beginning to learn, of 
all knowledge ; but it is doubly and trebly true 
of religious knowledge, of knowledge of God. 

I have said that to give disinterested de- 
votion is the first and last lesson that the 
Christian has to learn. It is a lesson, as many 
parents and teachers will testify, which chil- 
dren, even of tender years, can learn. But it 
is a lesson which children, however tender their 
years, must in the main learn for themselves, 
the most that we can do for them being to set 
them free to learn it, and, if we happen to set 
them a good example, to make it possible for 
them to follow it. Before we can do this, 
simple as it may sound, we must make two 
great changes. We must reform our aims and 
methods in education. We must reform our 
own social life. For so long as we can find no 
better way of rousing children to exertion than 
that of appealing to their competitive instincts, 
and so long as we set them an example of com- 
petitive selfishness, we shall teach them religion 
in vain. 

The reform of education is a theme on which 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 151 

I have already said much; and partly for this 
reason and partly because there is ever so much 
more to be said about it, I will not deal with 
it now. But I will say a few words about the 
reform of our social life. 



xvn 

SOCIAL EEFORM 

WE must reform our social life, for our 
own sake as well as for the sake of our 
children. Ever since Christ came into the 
world the social life of the West has been anti- 
Christian in spirit, its dominant features, to 
speak generally, having been selfishness, greed, 
and legalized injustice. In the Middle Ages 
the feudal lords oppressed the masses, the bulk 
of whom had not even the semblance of legal 
protection against their tyranny; and they 
quarreled violently among themselves, the 
motive that chiefly actuated them in their quar- 
rels being, in a word, rapacity — the lust of land 
and the "lust of sway." 

With the passing of the feudal system, rapac- 
ity changed its channels and its methods, but 
it continued to dominate our social life. In 
some respect the changes were for the worse. 

152 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 153 

In feudal times property had its duties and re- 
sponsibilities as well as its privileges. As time 
went on, most of the duties and responsibili- 
ties become obsolete, but most of the privileges 
remained. In the former half of the last 
century the squires of England fought tena- 
ciously for the retention of their privileges; 
but, if one may judge from the novels of the 
period, they had little or no sense of social 
obligation. They used their political power, 
which, before the passing of the First Eeform 
Act, was very great, to further their own in- 
terests. Thus they robbed the people by Act 
of Parliament of most of the common lands, 
and they passed Game Laws which are an 
abiding monument of class selfishness. 

In their anti-social doings they did not stand 
alone. With the spread of the spirit of ad- 
venture, a capitalist class had come into ex- 
istence and had gained steadily in power and 
importance. In the last century the manufac- 
turers and merchants first rivaled and then 
outrivaled the landed proprietors in wealth 
and political influence, and also in selfishness 
and greed. Capital oppressed labor so griev- 



154 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

ously that the latter was compelled to organize 
in self-defense. The organization of labor was 
met by the counter-organization of capital, the 
trade union by the "trust" or some other com- 
bination of employers, the strike by the lock- 
out; and a state of hostility between the two 
sections of society was initiated which threat- 
ened to develop into open warfare. 

Meanwhile the commercial spirit had spread 
from individuals to companies, from companies 
to trusts and cartels, and from trusts and 
cartels to nations, and had given rise to much 
international jealousy and rivalry and been 
the cause of more than one serious war. At 
last the explosive forces which had been ac- 
cumulating for centuries found an outlet for 
themselves in a stupendous catastrophe. The 
Great War, deliberately kindled by the nation 
which was the last stronghold of medieval 
feudalism and in which the feudal spirit had 
recently allied itself with the commercial, 
broke out and devastated and is still devas- 
tating (directly or indirectly) the greater part 
of the civilized world. But its outbreak averted 
or at least postponed what might have been 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 155 

an even more terrible catastrophe; for when 
the war began we seemed to be on the eve of 
a world-wide war between capital and labor, 
which might have imperiled (and may yet 
imperil) the whole structure of what we call 
civilization. 

When the exponents of Christian orthodoxy 
tell us that Christianity is relapsing into 
paganism, one is tempted to ask them when 
the high level was reached from which we have 
since been declining, and whether it was a high 
level of Christian virtue or only of Christian 
credulity and superstition. As one looks back 
to the earliest days of Christianity over the 
intervening welter of angry and selfish pas- 
sions of violence, injustice, disorder, and wide- 
spread misery, one sometimes wonders whether 
Christendom has ever, since those earliest days, 
been really Christian. During much of that 
time the authority of the Church was unques- 
tioned. What use did it make of its oppor- 
tunity? Did it deliver Christ's message to 
mankind? If it did, why did those who heard 
it pay so little heed to it? Men sometimes 
write as if the Church and Christianity were 



156 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

interchangeable terms. But the failure of 
Christendom, especially during the centuries of 
ecclesiastical ascendency, to practice the pre- 
cepts of its Master, is inexplicable except on 
the assumption that there is a wide difference 
between the Christianity of the Church (or the 
Churches) and the Christianity of Christ. 

We all hope that when the war is over there 
will be a general reconstruction of society. If 
that reconstruction is to be effective and en- 
dure, it must be accompanied by a reconstruc- 
tion of religion. For the only cure for all 
our social troubles is a return to the Chris- 
tianity of Christ. As a socializing and human- 
izing influence Christianity has on the whole 
been a failure. In its earliest days it brought 
a message of peace and good- will to mankind, 
and in teaching the potential equality of all 
men it prepared the way for an ideal social 
order. But when its own days of tribulation 
were over and its ascendency in the West was 
secured, it began to be demoralized by its suc- 
cess, and in the course of time it forgot its 
mission and betrayed its trust. For this there 
are two principal reasons. The first is that the 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 157 

ethical and social elements in it have been 
overshadowed by the doctrinal and ceremonial. 
The second is that, under the influence of an 
irrational and impossible eschatology, it has 
allowed an entirely individualistic conception 
of salvation to dominate the heart of the be- 
liever. 

The remedy for the first mistake is to 
remember that obedience to the two great 
commandments is the Alpha and Omega of 
Christianity, and that, by comparison with it, 
doctrinal and ceremonial correctness is non- 
essential. If men are Christians at heart, they 
will love God and love their fellow-men, and 
will prove their love by self-sacrifice and un- 
selfish devotion. If love cannot translate itself 
into action, it does not exist; and if love of 
God and man is wanting, the Christian's pro- 
fession of Christianity is fraudulent, and his 
correctness in doctrine and ceremony will 
profit him nothing. To place correctness in 
such matters on a par with unselfishness and 
love is to invite the former, as being much 
easier to achieve, to establish itself in the heart 
and conscience of the Christian at the expense 



158 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

of the latter. But official Christianity has gone 
further than this. It has, if anything, given 
precedence to doctrine and ceremony, for the 
reason that it can do to them what it cannot 
do to unselfishness and love — keep them under 
its own control. Hence the difference, in all 
ages, between the profession and the practice 
of Christianity, a difference which is perhaps 
less marked to-day than it has ever been, not 
because our practice is more Christian, but be- 
cause the critical and skeptical spirit is abroad 
and there is therefore less pressure on us than 
in the past to profess what we do not feel. 

If undue devotion to formula and ceremony 
has done much to demoralize and desocialize 
us, our static and dualistic eschatology has 
done more. Indeed I sometimes think that, 
next to our Jehovah worship, it has been the 
principal cause of the estrangement of Chris- 
tianity from Christ. The injustice and irra- 
tionality of a scheme of moral retribution 
which centers in the assumption that one earth 
life can determine a man's destiny for all 
eternity, and which can find no middle term 
between unending misery and unending bliss, 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 159 

are glaringly obvious. What is perhaps less 
obvious but not less significant is the sinister 
effect of the orthodox doctrine on the social 
life of Christendom. The prospect of dwelling 
forever in a state of changeless torment is so 
appalling that, wherever and whenever the 
doctrine of eternal punishment has been taken 
seriously, it has attracted to itself an undue 
share of the believer's interest in religion and 
in life; it has blinded his eyes to the realities 
of this world by making him gaze over intently 
into the next; it has tempted him to subor- 
dinate duty to God and man to duty to his 
own self-centered self, and the desire to serve 
God and man to the desire to achieve his own 
salvation — in other words, to escape hell-fire. 
It has thus raised individualism and egoism to 
the level of virtues, and in doing so has allied 
itself with, and strengthened by the alliance, 
the natural selfishness of man's heart. 

But men are ceasing to take the doctrine of 
eternal punishment seriously. Perhaps they 
are. But so far as they are, the whole idea 
of moral retribution, whether natural or super- 
natural, is in danger of going by the board. 



160 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

For either we do not believe in a future life 
and have therefore nothing to hope for beyond 
the grave and nothing to fear; or if we do 
believe in it, as hell is incredible and impos- 
sible, we take it for granted that somehow or 
other we shall all be saved. The result of 
this is that we are losing sight of the funda- 
mental truth that in conduct as in other matters 
we reap what we sow, and we are beginning 
to think that, apart from prudential considera- 
tions, it matters little how we live. But if it 
matters little how we live, we may as well live 
selfishly as unselfishly; and to hold the scales 
even, in thought and sentiment, between selfish- 
ness and unselfishness is to weight them heavily 
in practice in favor of the former. 

Christ himself said little or nothing about a 
future life; and Christianity would have done 
well to respect and imitate his reticence. It 
is true that he made use of and seemed to 
ratify the Messianic belief in a Last Judgment. 
But he did so in order to emphasize the 
supremacy of love. In his account of the Great 
Assize those who have loved and served their 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 161 

fellow-men will be saved; those who have not 
done so will be lost. The notation in which 
he expressed himself is nothing. The idea is 
everything. And the idea is surely sound to 
the very core. The reward of living for others 
— for God, for man, for the Universe — is the 
continuous expansion of life. The punishment 
of living for self is the continuous contraction 
of life. The reward and the punishment will 
go with us wherever we go. They may change 
the scale and the scope of their activities, but 
they will not change their essential characters. 
If there are a heaven and a hell beyond death, 
we shall have taken them with us. Unselfish 
love is its own reward, selfishness is its own 
punishment, in this life and in all others. 
Wherever we may find ourselves, in whatever 
world, on whatever plane of being, the differ- 
ence between living for God and God's king- 
dom and living for self is and will always be 
the difference between salvation and perdition, 
between life and death. 

If Christianity could reform itself in the two 
directions which have been indicated, if it 



162 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

could convince itself and convince us that un- 
selfish love is the heart and soul of religion, 
and that it is its own reward now and for all 
eternity, the reform of our social life to which 
we look forward would become something more 
than a mere dream. For, when love of God 
and one's fellow-men had become the master 
principle of man's life, and when, as the first 
fruits of such love, disinterested devotion to 
the common weal had taken the place in our 
hearts of devotion to our own selfish ends, the 
social problems that now perplex and distress 
us would have begun to solve themselves. How 
they would solve themselves remains to be seen. 
Eeligion can give us the spirit of unity and the 
supreme principle of union. But it cannot 
do more. The future, even the near future, 
veils its secrets from our prying eyes. Yet it 
is always permissible to prophesy; and there 
is one prediction, and one only, which I will 
allow myself to make. Since the war began, 
millions of our fellow-citizens have voluntarily 
joined the army, and in doing so have offered 
their lives to the service of their country. In 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 163 

the course of their military training these men 
have learned one great lesson — that organized 
comradeship is the ideal basis of social life. 
That lesson they will bring back with them to 
this country. And it is possible that, as the 
leaven of it works and spreads, we shall find 
in organized comradeship the true solution of 
our social problems and the fittest expression, 
in terms of social life, of the spirit of Christ's 
teaching. 

And this is not all. "The argument mounts." 
The development of our religious ideas reflects, 
if it does not actually keep pace with, our 
social and political progress. The autocratic 
conception of God, which was once the life of 
religion, has done its work and had its day. 
Sooner or later the democratic conception will 
take its place. When that day comes, we shall 
find that Christ, by formulating the two great 
commandments, made the best possible prepa- 
ration for its advent. The All-loving Father 
will then reveal himself as the presiding genius 
of the Cosmic Commonwealth, the symbol of 
its organic unity, the source and the goal of 



164 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

all its vital energies (the first and last of which 
is love), the central plexus of all its efferent 
and afferent nerves. And in the larger, as in 
the lesser commonwealth, organized comrade- 
ship will prove to be the ideal basis of social 
life. 



XVHI 

CHEIST AND GOD 

TWO great spiritual principles, two typical 
personalities, one might almost say, met 
in Christ, as later they met in St. Francis, the 
most Christlike of all Christians — the poet and 
the saint. 1 The combination is very rare; but 
when it is met with, its attractive force is 
irresistible. For each of the personalities 
corrects the deficiencies of the other, and so 
liberates its characteristic virtues and raises 
them to the highest power. The saint purifies 
and spiritualizes the poet. The poet vitalizes 
and humanizes the saint, tones down his aus- 
terity, relaxes his rigidity, and provides an 

*The thinker and the saint met in Buddha. The thinker 
and the poet (in spite of his stern condemnation of poetry) 
met in Plato. The poet -thinker is rare. The saint-thinker is 
rarer still. But the poet-saint is, I think, the rarest of the 
three. 

165 



166 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

antidote to his ultra-conscientiousness and his 
leaning towards legalism. 

So great is the magnetism, the compelling 
feharm of Christ, that he has even communi- 
cated it to the God whom he revealed to us. 
The saint in him has found its counterpart in 
the All-loving Father to whom one turns for 
guidance and prays for grace — to whom, above 
all, one can dedicate one's life. The poet in 
him has conjured away the limitations which 
human thought imposes on its deities, has 
etherealized and volatilized God, and im- 
mingled him, as it were, with all the spaces 
and all the ages. In other words, the com- 
bination of the saint and the poet in Christ has 
reproduced itself in God in the combination of 
the Father of men with the soul of the Uni- 
yerse. 

The relation of Christ to God is a theme on 
which much ingenuity has been expended, and 
much bad temper. And all to no purpose. The 
solution of the riddle is anything but meta- 
physical. When Christ said "I and my Father 
are one," he was surely the spokesman of 
Humanity. He wished us to realize our infini- 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 167 

tude, our potential divinity; to realize that God 
is the true self of each of us, that at the heart 
of man, as of nature, there is a quenchless 
fountain of ideal goodness, of love and light. 
His purpose was to reconcile God and man, to 
bring the infinite within the compass of human 
desire, if not of human thought — of human 
desire, and therefore, in the fullness of time, 
of human devotion and love. 



XIX 

THE MYSTERY OF EVIL 

SO radiant was Christ's optimism that not 
even the dark problem of evil could sully 
it with its shadow. The presence of evil in the 
Universe is a mystery which is impenetrable 
by human thought. Christ taught us that it 
is penetrable by human will. The mystery of 
evil seems to be intimately connected with the 
yet deeper mystery of growth. Wherever 
there is life there is growth. And wherever 
there is growth there is self-transcendence. 
We mean by self -transcendence the triumph of 
the ideal over the actual, of the goal of the 
process — the type which is struggling to evolve 
itself — over the stage which has actually been 
reached. A price has to be paid for this 
triumph. The resistance of the actual to the 
ideal has to be overcome. Self -transcendence, 
whether in a chrysalis or a saint, is the out- 

168 



THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 169 

come of self-sacrifice* And if self-transcend- 
ence, then growth. And if growth, then life. 
Therefore, if you would find yourself, you must 
lose yourself; if you would live, you must die. 
For Christ this was the conclusion of the 
whole matter, the pivot of his whole scheme of 
life. In the struggle, inherent in every process 
of growth, between what is and what is to be, 
we have the germ of the moral conflict. We 
know, each for himself, that in the resistance 
of the actual to the ideal, of finality to infini- 
tude, of the call of self to the call of the 
Universe, of the love of self to the love of God 
and man, we are witnessing, or rather experi- 
encing, the rebellion of evil against good. It 
was on this knowledge and this experience that 
Christ took his stand. Appealing to the strong- 
est and (in the last resort) the purest of all 
motives, the instinct to live, Christ bade us go 
to the headquarters of evil and solve the mys- 
tery of its being by eradicating its source. He 
taught us that 

"The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound" 

if — but this is a large if — we have the strength 



170 THE SECRET OF THE CROSS 

and the resolution to annul it. He taught us 
to grasp and strangle the "snake of self"; to 
renounce the semblance of life that we might 
gain the reality; to die to the false self, to die 
to a thousand false selves, that we might live 
to the true self, to the universal self, to God. 
To the mystery of evil he opposed the mystery 
of self-sacrifice, the mystery of self -transcend- 
ence, the mystery of death and resurrection, 
the secret of the Cross. 



THE END. 



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